Ralph Rexford Bellamy was born in Chicago, Cook County, Illinois on June 17. 1904 to Charles Rexford Bellamy and Lilla Louise Smith (born in Hamilton Ontario) as 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. They lived in an apartment at 5709 Kimbark Avenue on Chicago's South side and moved from Chicago at the age of 5 to Wilmette, Linden Avenue, and then Forest Avenue. 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 (1910) and then his grandmother. He received his first semi-acting class (which he would later term 'ham acting') from his Great Aunt Ella.

Early on Ralph was always playing "theatre". He loved every phase of it, often writing the play, coaching his playmates in their parts, and designing the costumes and attending to the make-up before the performance. Naturally he played the villain's role.

When he was young, he worked as a paper delivery boy, a grocery delivery boy (at Brinkman's Grocery Store), an usher at movie theaters, and a soda jerk. At home he raked and burnt leaves and beat rugs. As a child he had shown a strong inclination for geology. As a consequence, his parents had visions of him becoming a famous geologist.

The acting urge it may have taken hold at age 15 when, while working as a bellboy at Balboa Bay (Newport Beach) during a summer trip to Southern California with his mother, he met silent screen actress Louise Lovely and told her he wanted to be an actor. She got him a job as an extra in Wings of the Morning (Fox, Nov 24. 1919) which was being shot there. He was paid $5 for being drenched with a fire hose in a shipwreck scene...⁽⁵⁾ He made his screen debut as a cabin boy, delivering a message to another of the famous Farnum brothers, William.

Curiously enough, a play called Suppressed Desires was the first to be produced by Ralph when he organized a "little theatre" group of players on the North Side of Chicago when he was sixteen (1920). The high school dramatic company was named The North Shore Players** (1920 - 21).

Also at 16 he wrote and produced a play called Nothing. “The utter futility of it was terribly dampening, considering his age. And I wouldn't be a bit surprised if some day Ralph left the stage and wrote plays instead.” his father attested once. He co-wrote the piece with another member of the North Shore Players Fenn Germer.

One Saturday night, he went to Hamlet given by a stock company in the town near which he worked. He thought he recognized one of the players. After the show, a young man stepped up to him with a greeting. It was Nicholas Whitney, and he had played with John Gregory Adams. He played the role of Yorick.

Just started in his first year at High School he told his parents he wanted to go into acting. His parents were strongly opposed and young 17 year old Bellamy ran away with nothing more than faith in himself and $2. A freight train took him to Cedar Rapids, Iowa, about 200 miles from home. He still had 50 cents left when he saw a tent on a piece of land with a sign reading “John Gregory Adams United Stock Company Largest Little Shows on Earth.” He walked right up to John Gregory and asked if he could use someone. After the latter asked him his experience, to his own surprise, he was accepted into the stock company and headed West for 4 months. (11)

The show soon did that which seems to be inevitable for all wandering stock companies. It went broke and disbanded. Bellamy found himself in Provo, Utah, with winter soon approaching. A chance meeting with a sheep herder in a pool room brought the next decision to him. He was told of a job packing sheep wool in the stockyards. He remained several weeks until a job which paid more money presented itself. A few weeks before spring came over the mountains another chance meeting came to Bellamy. (11)

He met William 'Bill' Owen at a gathering of ardent stage enthusiasts (1921). Owen was a sterling Shakespearian actor. He took interest in Ralph and offered him the difficult leading role in Charles Rann Kennedy's The Servant in the House, which he was casting. Ralph played the role that well that when the show closed Billy Owen started coaching him for future roles. Like most juveniles Ralph played old men with funny beards. There he met Melvyn Douglas. Ralph stayed with Owen for a couple of seasons in the traveling troupe of Shakespearean players. He played Fleance in Macbeth and both Bassanio in The Merchant of Venice and the noble Moor with the pillow-complex in Othello.

When the show reached Waukegan, forty miles from Chicago, young Bellamy decided to visit his parents. After being away for a year he was greeted with the same consternation as when he had confided to his parents that he wanted to become an actor. The father pleaded until next day for his son to give up acting. By dawn the boy consented. “My father was a struggling advertising man, who wound up with his own company with a partner. At one time they had Buick which was his biggest account but never a great success. A hard working, interesting fellow and well liked in his circles in Chicago.” Ralph was placed as an ad writer in his father's advertising firm. The fond parent soon had cause to regret his action. His son's mind was upon all things under the sun — except advertising. After a few weeks, to the mutual benefit of both, the son was fired.

Then Bellamy performed in stock and repertory theatres with the Chautauqua Road Company (1922), even under a tent. His very first major role touring in The Shepherd of the Hills (Jun 1922), an Ozark melodrama, had him playing two roles: the father of the lead (who was almost ten years Ralph's senior) and the villain.

He continued to travel all through the Midwest, with stock companies (1922 - 23) in Madison, Wisconsin, and Fort Wayne and Evansville, Indiana. In each location he would stay for 10, 12, 15 weeks, or more, doing a different play every week. He rehearsed one play all day long while performing another at night.

“It wasn't any bed of roses. Lots of times I went to bed hungry. And between engagements I worked at anything that offered three meals a day and a place to sleep. Even dug ditches several times, but I didn't mind. i was just marking time until I could get back to the job I liked best.”

His friend Melvyn Douglas, a student of Bill Owen, also a struggling young actor, had gotten a job as the leading man in the Dorothy La Vern stock company (Orpheum Theatre Madison, Wisconsin) and managed to get Bellamy on as business and stage manager at $40 a week.

The Sherman Stock Company began its run at the Grand Theater, Evansville (Indiana) with Melvyn and Ralph on Sep 2. 1923.

He returned to Madison a second time. In 1924 the Fisher's Players brought Scandal (Majestic Theater, Madison, WI) with Melvyn Douglas and Ralph Bellamy. At the close of that season Melvyn and Ralph went to different companies and didn't see each other for a while.

He left the Fisher Majestic Players to rejoin Dorothy La Vern Company (Dec 1924 - Mar 1925). On to Ishpeming, Michigan where in 1924 Bellamy became a member of a repertory troupe operated by the Beach and Jones Repertoire Company. He was to be the carpenter, stage manager and general business man.
The following year joined another troupe managed by (Charles) John Winninger. The John Winniger Players went on tour through Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota. Ralph was the leading man but salaries was small.

In 1924 - 1925 he seemed to try everything: he did Tab shows (tab being the diminutive of tabloid) for Fred Hurley's Jolly Follies opening in East Palestine, Ohio (1924), he tried black-face in McKeesport, Penn. in a song and dance act called Hope and Byrne, there is a contract dated June 14. 1924 with the Jackson Players, he played the lead with a stock company (1925 - 26) in Waterloo, Iowa.

Ralph was the leading man when the Sherman stock company played in St. Jo(seph), Missouri  So this is London (Lyceum, Feb 2. 1925). They remained with the company at least until Nov 8. 1925 when Ralph together with Violet Manning also performed Summer stock in Terre Haute, Indiana. Bellamy left Terre Haute when he was still leading man in the Sherman Stock company at the Hippodrome Theatre.

Summer Stock opened at Shea's Opera house, Jamestown, New York on May 31. 1926 with Just Married, Nancy Duncan and Ralph Bellamy in the lead roles. This was part of a ten-week uneventful season as leading man in the Fiber and Shea Stock Company.

Bellamy went back to Des Moines in 1926 as a 22-year-old leading man in the Morgan-Wallace stock company at the old Princess Theater. When Wallace decided against undertaking another season, Bellamy took over the lease. "The Ralph Bellamy Players" made their debut on September 12. 1926 with Austin Strong's World War romance Seventh Heaven****. "We played 10 shows a week at the Princess." They played two 36-week seasons, 1926-27 and 1927-28 in Des Moines. His father put up the starting money and profits carried the venture. His father also became the bus and house manager for the company (for 5 years) and his brother Richard assistant house manager. Bellamy was a star at the theater for three years and they eventually build out a new base in Nashville, Tennessee. They had two successful seasons in Nashville, interspersed with a short season in Evanston, Illinois, and Wilmette.

Ralph had met Alice Delbridge when they were both playing in stock. She was nineteen, the ingénue in the company, and he was twenty-two. They were constantly together at the theater, and soon the love scenes they played behind the footlights became very real to them. “We fell head over heels in love. We didn't stop to consider that our tastes were not the same, nor that we seldom liked the same things or the same people.”

On October 27. 1927 Bellamy failed to appear for the evening performance (heralded as his 500th consecutive performance). They thought they would return in time for the show, but their luck ran out somewhere. At Winterset being after hours for the court clerk they were unsuccessful to obtain a marriage license. At Knoxville it was the same. They then started for Indianola. According to different versions they either developed motor trouble or lost their way. As a result, 300 ticket holders received refunds for the evening show. They were married several months later ⁽⁴⁾ in St. Paul's Episcopal Church in Des Moines, Polk, Iowa on December 27. 1927.

Applesauce (Apr 18. 1928) would be the Ralph Bellamy players farewell performance at the Princess theater.

He came to work in the Borscht Circuit in the Summer of 1928 as an assistant to Moss Hart. Each one of the big hotels catering to the Jewish population of New York had a large staff (musicians, dancers, actors,...) whose main duty was to keep the guests in good humor. In the weekend they'd do plays, musicals and vaudeville.

Once again he was on the road with a stock company. It went broke and disbanded in Florida. It was in a small town at the edge of the Everglades, where everybody was selling real estate. Bellamy went to work on the thousands of Middle Westerners who were scrambling for Florida land. His profits — on paper — amounted to seventy thousand dollars. The young man dreamed of his own theatre, and his own servants. All Florida real estate men were wealthy on paper, and Bellamy had at last come into his own. (11) When the crash (Oct 1929) came Ralph was already back in New York.

There he first spent, in early Summer, 6 weeks with a stock company in Freeport, Long Island at $50 a week while he and Melvyn Douglas haunted the offices of Broadway agents. Melvyn stayed with his parents and offered Ralph lodgings. Finally, Bellamy won a part in Town Boy (Belmont Theatre, Oct 4. - 31. 1929) on Broadway. It closed after two performances.

Returning to the Freeport Theatre he played in White Cargo (Nov 8- 9, 1929) with Ann Kingsley, Hassell Shelton, and Douglas Cosgrove. Ralph also toured with Hope Williams in Holiday. ⁽⁵⁾

There Ralph first met actress Catherine Willard when he starred in George Cukor's stock company*** in the play Romance (Lyceum, June 19. 1930) in Rochester. Both were married to others. When this Kondolf-Folmer company opened in April 1930 in Rochester it was announced that Catherine Willard, "a favorite of other seasons" would be back later in the season. Ralph played the male lead in the majority of the productions. The company played at the Lyceum (or RKO Palace) in Rochester.

1930 program at the Lyceum (weeks starting with):
    Journey's End (Mar 31 - Apr 7),
    The Bachelor's Father (Apr 14),
    The Little Accident (Apr 19),
    Dracula (Apr 26),
    Holiday (May 3) with Dorothy Gish,
    The Front Page (May 12),
    Broken Dishes (May 19),
    Subway Express (May 26),
    Coquette (Jun 2) with Helen Hayes,
    Rebound (Jun 9), 
Catherine Willard returns
    Romance (Jun 16),
    Other Men's Wives (Jun 23),
    The Command to Love  (Jun 30),
    Strange Interlude (Jul 7), (closing the season).

Together with Catharine Willard at RKO Palace, Rochester Ralph appeared in a 'Vaudeville" one-act playlet Suppressed Desires (Jul 20.) as a support for a movie Hell's Island.

Ralph and Catharine were close friends by the time the company disbanded. Shortly after the season ended Ralph confided to his Rochester friends he was seeking a divorce.

In New York as soon as he was able, he had sent for his wife. However, even the birth of their daughter (circa 1929) couldn't erase the knowledge that their marriage was a failure. For the baby's sake, they tried to make the best of it for another year. The curtain fell on his first marriage in 1931. “Then, without any hard feelings on either side, we separated,” Bellamy said. In her divorce petition, however, Delbridge charged cruelty and non-support. She stated that she and Bellamy had been separated since 1930 ⁽⁴⁾ in Des Moines, Polk, Iowa.

Returning to New York City in August 1930, practically broke, he found a nicely decorated basement room in a cold-water flat on West Eleventh Street near the river in Greenwich Village. He thought he was ready for Broadway. Apparently he wasn't. Things got so bad he was down to living on peanuts and water. He recalled in his book that a policeman once saw him stealing a bottle of milk from a doorstep, but turned away out of apparent pity.⁽⁵⁾

“Once I was stranded in New York. Hadn't eaten for four days. I heard of job about twenty-two block from my rooming house. No money for car fare. So I hiked it - both ways. By the time I reached the place, somebody else had been hired, so there was nothing to do but turn around and go home.
I was so weak from hunger that I could scarcely climb the five flight of stair to my dingy little room. Well, I filled up on water and lay down on the bed to read 'Crime and Punishment.' It was a pretty morbid thing for a starving man to be reading. I don't know what happened. I'm sure I was neither unconscious nor in a state of coma, but all of a sudden I found myself out on the fire escape ready to jump off into space! Crazy, wasn't it? I've never been able to explain it. Lord knows I wouldn't commit suicide under any circumstance. Just being alive is pretty nice, any way you look at it.”

After 5 days of starvation, a Chicago agent offered his a place in a stock company and wired him the money he needed. In fact Chamberlain Brown asked him to see Arthur Hopkins a brilliant and successful Broadway producer about a part in Roadside. He went to see him in August and got the part.

His appearance in the Broadway play Roadside (Longacre Theatre, Sep 26 - Oct 4. 1930) would proof to be a turning point in his career. On the opening night of the latter the audience greeted his most poignant lines with outbursts of applause. His work in that play was acclaimed one of the five best performances of the 1930 - 1931 season and led to his Hollywood contract.

He received four contract offers and signed with United Artists.

“When I finally set out, I was on my way to Hollywood under contract to Joe Schenck. On the way, I stopped in Chicago to say hello to an old friend from New York, Frank Morgan. He really let me have it for going to Hollywood, criticizing me from the perspective of a legitimate theater actor. In those days, many stage actors looked down on Hollywood, especially silent films, and Frank was no exception. He called me every name in the book—even a 'prostitute'—and told me I was wasting my talent. Still, despite his harsh words, he came down to the train station to see me off.

Fast-forward six to eight months: I was in Hollywood when I got a phone call. Who was on the other end? None other than Frank Morgan himself—he had just arrived in Hollywood to work in pictures. So now there were two of us.

My first impression of Hollywood was unforgettable. It was December 1930, but it was hot. I remember stepping out onto Hollywood Boulevard, where crowds had gathered along the sidewalks, waiting for a parade. Eventually, it arrived. Leading the procession were four stuffed reindeer on floats, followed by a sleigh on another float carrying Santa Claus. Behind that was yet another float with a wind machine and a man throwing confetti into it, sending a flurry of artificial snow up Hollywood Boulevard.

That was my first real taste of Hollywood Boulevard in action.”

On his trip to California he had a drawing room, supplied by Schenck, but no money for meals. The salary from Roadside had paid his debt but left him broke again. Roadside's producer Arthur Hopkins discovered this and insisted on lending him money so he could arrive in Hollywood with some kind of dignity. Which he did on a Saturday in November 1930. 

But the head of UA, Joseph Schenck, never used him in a picture, choosing instead to lend him out to other studios -- first to MGM for his debut in the gangster film The Secret Six (MGM, Apr 11. 1931) where he played a baby-faced killer next to Wallace Beery, Jean Harlow, Clark Gable, Johnny Mack Brown, and Lewis Stone.

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 aka Tomorrow's World (Ethel Barrymore Theatre, Apr 14. 1943 - Jun 17. 1944).

Ralph directed the unsuccessful Broadway play Pretty Little Parlor (National Theatre, Apr 17. - 22. 1944).

During 1944, he appeared as guest star on 27 major coast-to-coast programs, a record for guest performers. The year before he recorded a Victor Red Seal Album of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass.

In 1945, he played a lionized Presidential aspirant in Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse's Pulitzer Prize winning comedy State of the Union (Hudson Theatre, Nov 14. 1945 - Sep 13. 1947), (incidentally, Spence would reprise the role in a film of the same name).

August 6. 1945 Catherine Willard was granted a divorce on the basis of "extreme cruelty".

August 21. 1945 Ralph married Ethel Smith in Harrison, N.Y and the couple lived in Ethel's Park Vendome apartment. In 1947 Bellamy walked out, stating that he had no intention of paying his wife alimony. Ethel charged abandonment and claimed that he drank heavily, that he was moody, and would lock himself in his room. The organist said her husband became jealous when at their parties she received most of the attention. Bellamy contended that she had advised him to be home fifteen minutes after his final curtain or he would find the door locked. ⁽³⁾

Throughout the 1930s and '40s, Bellamy was regularly seen socially with a select circle of friends known affectionately as the "Irish Mafia," although they preferred the less sensational "Boy's Club." This group consisted of a group of Hollywood A-listers who were mainly of Irish descent (despite Bellamy having no Irish family connections himself). Others included James Cagney, Pat O'Brien, Spencer Tracy, Lynne Overman, Frank Morgan and Frank McHugh. (2)

In 1948 he made his a television debut in the Philco Television Playhouse (NBC, Nov 7. 1948 - Jan 29. 1956, min. 4x). 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 (Hudson Theatre, Mar 23. 1949 - Aug 12. 1950).

The play Detective Story was a hit and led to a role in the television series Man Against Crime (aka Follow that Man), which aired from 1949 to 1954. 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.

Alice Murphy was an executive in Ralph's agent's office when they first met in 1941. They saw each other at meetings and business lunches. It was about eight years before they had their first official social date. Ralph starred in the play. The day before Thanksgiving, he asked if she was going to her family's home in Connecticut for the vacation. Alice replied that she would stay in town to clean up her apartment. The next day he called her and invited her to a Thanksgiving dinner. They married exactly one year later on Thanksgiving November 27. 1949.

The Bellamys were now living in one of the first apartment buildings that were built in uptown Manhattan around 1886, which was an ideal spot for Ralph's two hobbies. A cook of distinction, he was given free run of the kitchen at Henri's Fifty-Second Street restaurant. He also painted New York scenes and sold his first water color at an Urban League competition.

He had a role in the TV-series Dick Powell's Zane Grey Theatre episode "Stars over Texas"  (CBS, Dec 28. 1956).

Above left: Ralph just sneaks in with President Kennedy & Dorothy Provine at W.H. Correspondents Dinner Sheraton Park Hotel, Washington, D.C. on February 25, 1961.
Above right: Ralph Bellamy starring as Dr. L. Richard Starke in the 1963 - 64 NBC series The Eleventh Hour.

Above left: Ralph Bellamy as FDR in the TV miniseries War and Remembrance (ABC, 1988 - 89).
Above right: Ralph Bellamy opposite Richard Gere in Pretty Woman (Buena Vista, Mar 23. 1990).

Other references
(1) IMDb
(2) Wikipedia
(3) "Whatever Became Of....?" , Third Series by Richard Lamparski, 1970
(4) "To Bellamy, a leading man in Des Moines", Eva Ryker,
     November 30. 1991
(5) "Ralph Bellamy Dies; Veteran Actor Won Fame for F.D.R. Role",
     (Los Angeles Times, Nov 30. 1991)
(6) OTRRpedia
(7) Radiogoldindex
(8) Playbill
(9) IBDB
(10) "When Smoke Hits the Fan" Ralph Bellamy, 1979
(11) "Failure Couldn't Lick Ralph Bellamy" Jim Tully, March 1935
(12) Spectra - IOBDB
(13) "Blond Villain" by Barbara Barry (Picture Play Magazine, Dec 1932)
(14) Ralph Bellamy Papers, 1904-1980 Wisconsin Historical Society
(15) Ralph Bellamy 1991 Interview by Dina Di Mambro

Additional video & audio sources
(1) The Awful Truth (Movie Clip, 1937)
(2) What's My Line? (Tv program, Jan 19,1958)
(3) Sunrise at Campobello (Movie Trailer, 1960)
(4) The Most Deadly Game Clip YouTube by retronewfoundland
(5) Ralph Bellamy Career Retrospective SAG-AFTRA May 10. 1989 YouTube
(6) Ralph Bellamy interview John Gallagher - 1983 YouTube
     part 2 - part 3
(7) Penthouse Mystery 1941 (Upscaled) Full Movie Youtube