Date of Birth: Fri, Jun 17, 1904
Place of Birth: Chicago, Illinois, USA
Ralph Bellamy, the veteran actor who was so well-liked and respected by his peers that he was the recipient of an honorary Oscar in 1987 for his contributions to the acting profession, was born on June 17, 1904 in Chicago, Illinois. He began his life as a player right out of high school in 1922, joining a traveling company that put on Shakespearean plays. For the next five years, he appeared with stock companies and repertory theaters associated with the Chautauqua Road Co., which brought culture to the hinterlands. He not only learned his craft, he wound up owning his own theatrical troupe by 1927. Two years later, he made his Broadway theatrical debut in "Town Boy" (29 years later, he would win a Tony Award).Bellamy made the first of his over 100 films in 1933, appearing as a gangster in "The Secret Six." While Ralph Bellamy never became a star or played many leads in A-pictures, he made a career out of playing second-leads in top productions before developing into a character actor. In his heyday in motion pictures, he typically played a rich but dull character who is jilted by the leading lady (he won his only Oscar nomination, for Best Supporting Actor, for just such a role in the 1937 comedy "The Awful Truth, in which he lost Irene Dunne to Cary Grant). He also specialized in redoubtable detectives who always find their man (he starred as Ellery Queen in four B-movies), and as slightly sinister yet stylish villains (the latter typecasting reaching its apogee with his turn as the not-so-kindly doctor in the horror classic "Rosemary's Baby").Ralph Bellamy's greatest role was as Franklin Delano Roosevelt in Dore Schary's play "Sunrise at Campobello," for which he won a 1958 Best Actor-Dramatic Tony Award. He also