alph Bellamy (17 Jun 1904  -  29 Nov 1991)

Height: 6' 1½" (1.87 m)
Wife & children:
Alice Delbridge, 1927 - 1930 (divorced) one child
Catherine Willard, 1931 - 1945 (divorced), adopted: Lynn McCrudden
Ethel Smith (an organist): 1945 - 1947 (divorced)
Alice Murphy (talent agent): 1949 - his death
Sister: Carolyn Walbridge.

Mid-1904 Ralph Rexford Bellamy was born in Chicago to Charles Rexford Bellamy and Lilla Louise Smith. He would be the eldest of three children. His father worked at the Barnes Crosby advertising agency. When he was young, he lived with his widowed maternal grandmother, father, mother, brother and sister. He lived in an apartment at 5709 Kimberk Avenue on Chicago's South side. He moved from Chicago at the age of 5. He was raised Baptist and was extremely close with his red-haired grandmother; and his first experience with death was the death of his 24 day old brother and then his grandmother. He received his first semi-acting class (which he would later term 'ham acting') from his Great Aunt Ella.

He attended New Trier High School in Winnetka, Illinois. He was president of the Drama Club there. Soon after, he would leave, being expelled for smoking on school grounds. So in 1922 he joined a traveling troupe of Shakespearean players. Later that same year, Bellamy performed in stock and repertory theatres with the Chautauqua Road Company. In 1929, he made his broadway debut in Town Boy .

Ralph owned his own stock company for four seasons from 1926 - 1930. It was called "The Ralph Bellamy Players" and it toured Nashville, Evanston, and Iowa (including Des Moines). Overall, he spent nine years in repertory and touring companies, playing over 400 roles, including an average of two or three in each play. His very first major role touring in "The Shepherd of the Hills," an Ozark melodrama, had him playing two roles: the father of the lead (who was almost ten years Ralph's senior) and the villain.

Often a leading man, Bellamy achieved greater success in supporting roles as "the other man". In a career that spanned six decades on stage and screen, Bellamy played roles that fell into three broad categories: 1) the rich, reliable, but dull figure who is jilted by the leading lady, 2) the detective who always finds his prey, and 3) the slightly sinister but stylish villain. Usually appearing in supporting roles, Bellamy often said he never regarded himself as a leading man, so no one else did either.
Making his film debut in the gangster film The Secret Six (1931). He starred in numerous whodunits, first as Inspector Trent (in four 1933-34 programmers) beginning with Before Midnight and then as super-sleuth Ellery Queen (in four terrible 1940-41 B's beginning with Ellery Queen, Master Detective).

But in 1942, he spotted a script on a producer's desk which had scribbled the description of the casting for a particular part, "Wealthy oilman from Southwest - able, but simple and naive. Typical Ralph Bellamy part." He immediately took his leave of Hollywood and its typecasting of him, knowing it was no more than a job. He took his risks, however, being at the height of a lucrative career for Broadway. As luck would have it, he had a string of stage and television successes that he would value more than any of his early films, along with the occasional film.

In 1943, he played an antifascist professor in a Broadway melodrama written by James Gow and Arnaud d'Usseau, "Tomorrow the World" or "Tomorrow's World." In 1945, he played a lionized Presidential aspirant in Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse's Pulitzer Prize winning comedy "State of the Union," (incidentally, Spence would reprise the role in a film of the same name).

In 1948 he made his a television debut in the Philco Television Playhouse. After divorcing his third wife and paying for continuing medical bills for his daughter, Bellamy had little finances when he was offered the part of Detective McLeod, an overzealous police officer, in Sidney Kingsley's drama "Detective Story" (1949). The play was a hit and lead to a part in the 1949 - 1954 television series "Man Against Crime."(aka "Follow that Man") He played as a quick-fisted but otherwise well-liked detective Mike Barnett. The show was the first live weekly half-hour dramatic show on network television, and he won an Academy of Radio and Television Arts and Sciences Award for his performance on it.  In 1956 (28.Dec) he had a role in the tv-series Dick Powell's "Zane Grey Theatre" episode "Stars over Texas".

In 1958, he would play FDR in Dore Schary's Broadway play "Sunrise at Campobello" -- here Bellamy built his reputation as an actor by portraying Franklin Delano Roosevelt. By delving into the history of FDR the man and the politician, he came to an understanding of the personality and psyche of the character. He then spent weeks at a rehabilitation center learning how to manage braces, crutches, and a wheelchair, so that his portrayal of FDR, after he was stricken with polio, would be realistic and accurate. In preparing for the original part, he would consult at length with Eleanor Roosevelt and her children. He called "Sunrise at Campobello" the "highlight of my professional career." It can be said that character acting was defined and perfected by Ralph Bellamy. He won the Tony and New York's Critics Circle Award as best actor in Sunrise at Campobella and starred in the subsequent film version in 1960. He would play FDR once again in the 1983 miniseries "The Winds of War."

He played as a regular in many major television series including The Eleventh Hour (1963-1964), The Survivors (1969), The Mostly Deadly Game (1970), and Hunter (1976). He returned true to his roles as detective, villain, and other man in each of these series. It was in 1969 that Bellamy made a radical character shift by playing a diabolist in Rosemary's Baby. Director John Landis gave Bellamy's film career a big boost by casting him in Trading Places (1983), as a ruthless Wall Street manipulator and brother to Don Ameche. So we come to see him in several movies e.g. Amazon Women on the Moon (1987), and Coming to America (1988, a cameo) and ofcourse a benevolent shipping magnate in the 1990 movie Pretty Woman

Bellamy was also one of the founding members of the Screen Actors Guild and a four-term president of Actors' Equity (between 1952 and 1964). Best remembered by his fellow actors as a champion of actors' rights. He doubled the equity's assets within six years and established the first actors' pension fund. Bellamy guided the Actors' Equity through the political blacklisting of the McCarthy era by forming a panel that established ground rules to protect members against unproved charges of Communist Party membership or sympathy. He also actively lobbied for the repeal of theatre admission taxes and for income averaging in computing taxes for performers.  He received an honorary Oscar in 1986. His autobiography, "When the Smoke Hit the Fan," was published in 1979.

Bellamy died at St. John's Hospital and Health Center in Los Angeles of a lung ailment at the age of 87 at 2:18 a.m. He had been hospitalized earlier in the month for his long-standing lung disease.