page_title: Ralph Bellamy
section_title: Film and television career
hierarchical_section_title: Ralph Bellamy / Film and television career
caption_attribution_description: Publicity photo from the premiere of the television program The Dick Powell Show. Standing, from left: Ronald Reagan, Nick Adams, Lloyd Bridges, Mickey Rooney, Edgar Bergen, Jack Carson, Ralph Bellamy, Kay Thompson, Dean Jones. Seated, from left, Carolyn Jones and Dick Powell.
context_page_description: Ralph Rexford Bellamy was an American actor whose career spanned 62 years on stage, film, and television. During his career, he played leading roles as well as supporting roles, garnering acclaim and awards, including an Tony Award for Best Dramatic Actor in Sunrise at Campobello and Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor for The Awful Truth.
context_section_description: His film career began with The Secret Six (1931) starring Wallace Beery and featuring Jean Harlow and Clark Gable.  By the end of 1933, he had already appeared in 22 movies, most notably Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (1932) and the second lead in the action film Picture Snatcher with James Cagney (1933).  He played in seven more films in 1934 alone, including Woman in the Dark, based on a Dashiell Hammett story, in which Bellamy played the lead, second-billed under Fay Wray.  Bellamy kept up the pace through the decade,  receiving a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his role in The Awful Truth (1937) with Irene Dunne and Cary Grant, and played a similar part, that of a naive boyfriend competing with the sophisticated Grant character, in His Girl Friday (1940). He portrayed detective Ellery Queen in a few films during the 1940s, but as his film career did not progress, he returned to the stage, where he continued to perform throughout the 1950s. Bellamy appeared in other movies during this time, including Dance, Girl, Dance (1940) with Maureen O'Hara and Lucille Ball, and the horror classic The Wolf Man (1941) with Lon Chaney, Jr. and Evelyn Ankers. He also appeared in The Ghost of Frankenstein in 1942 with Chaney and Bela Lugosi.
  In 1949, Bellamy starred in the television noir private eye series Man Against Crime (also known as Follow That Man) on the DuMont Television Network; initially telecast live in its earliest seasons, the program lasted until 1956 and was simulcast for a season on Dumont and NBC, and ran on CBS during a different year. The lead role was taken by Frank Lovejoy in 1956, who subsequently starred in NBC's Meet McGraw detective series.
  Bellamy appeared on television in numerous roles over the following years.  He was a regular panelist on the CBS television game show To Tell the Truth during its initial run. Bellamy starred as Willard Mitchell, along with Patricia Breslin and Paul Fix, in the 1961 episode "The Haven" of CBS's anthology series The DuPont Show with June Allyson. About this same time, he also appeared on the NBC anthology series, The Barbara Stanwyck Show. In December 1961, he portrayed the part of Judge Quince in the episode "Judgement at Hondo Seco" on CBS's Rawhide.
  During the 1963–1964 television season, Bellamy co-starred with Jack Ging in the NBC medical drama The Eleventh Hour, in the role of a psychiatrist in private practice. Wendell Corey had appeared in the first season of the series.
  Bellamy appeared on Broadway in one of his most famous roles, as Franklin Delano Roosevelt in Sunrise at Campobello, winning a Tony Award for the role in 1957. He reprised the role in the 1960 film version.
  In the summer of 1961, Bellamy hosted nine original episodes of a CBS Western anthology series called Frontier Justice, a Dick Powell Four Star Television production. In 1950 Bellamy became a member of The Lambs, an actors club located in New York.
  In 1962, Bellamy was cast as a minister, Daniel Quint, in the 1962 episode, "The Vintage Years," on the syndicated anthology series, Death Valley Days, hosted by Stanley Andrews. In the story line, a young woman whom Quint befriends on a stagecoach ride, Lorna Erickson (Merry Anders), sets him up to be robbed by her paramour, Johnny Meadows (William Bryant).
  Highly regarded within the industry, Bellamy served as a four-term President of Actors' Equity from 1952–1964. On film, Bellamy also starred in the Western The Professionals (1966) as an oil tycoon married to Claudia Cardinale opposite adventurers Burt Lancaster and Lee Marvin, and Roman Polanski's Rosemary's Baby (1968) as an evil physician, before turning to television during the 1970s. Among many roles in numerous shows, sometimes as a series regular, Bellamy portrayed Adlai Stevenson in the 1974 TV-movie The Missiles of October, a treatment of the Cuban Missile Crisis.  He was a member of the cast of the short-lived CBS espionage drama Hunter in 1977.
  An Emmy Award nomination for the mini-series The Winds of War (1983) – in which Bellamy reprised his Sunrise at Camp
caption: Guest stars for the 1961 premiere episode of The Dick Powell Show, "Who Killed Julie Greer?".  Standing, from left: Ronald Reagan, Nick Adams, Lloyd Bridges, Mickey Rooney, Edgar Bergen, Jack Carson, Ralph Bellamy, Kay Thompson, Dean Jones. Seated, from left: Carolyn Jones and Dick Powell.
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