Full name, Ralph Rexford Bellamy; born June 17, 1904, in Chicago, IL; died ofa lung ailment, November 29, 1991, in Los Angeles, CA. Actor and author. A veteran of more than one hundred films, Bellamy won his greatest acclaim for portraying Franklin D. Roosevelt in the Broadway play Sunrise at Campobello, which earned him an Antoinette Perry Award for best actor in 1958. He began his acting career with repertory theater troupes in the Midwest. After some short-lived roles on Broadway he went into films in the 1930s; he appeared in approximately sixty during the decade, giving an Academy Award-nominatedperformance with Cary Grant in The Awful Truth. In 1942 Bellamy leftHollywood for television and stage work. His theater successes in the 1940s included Tomorrow the World and Detective Story. On television he appeared in numerous leading series, notably Man against Crime, forwhich he won a best actor award from the Academy of Radio and Television Artsand Sciences in 1950. He also received four Emmy Award nominations for his work in programs such as the movie Missiles of October and the miniseries The Winds of War, in which he once again played Roosevelt. Among Bellamy's later film roles were appearances in Rosemary's Baby, Trading Places, and Pretty Woman. He received an honorary Academy Awardfor his body of work in film in 1987 and the first annual Hal Roach Entertainment Award. Bellamy was a founding director of the Screen Actors Guild, andas president of Actors' Equity he helped unionize the Off-Broadway theater and establish actors' pension funds. He chronicled his career in his 1979 memoir, When the Smoke Hit the Fan.
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