I like old time movies and radio shows and such and was wondering since college educations didn’t really take off till after WWII and the GI Bill, which celebrities (let’s use 1950 as a cut off date) had college degrees?
Thanks
I found a couple to start
Katharine Hepburn - Bryn Mawr College - history and philosophy
James Stewart - Princeton - Architecture
Some silent film actors:
[ul]
[li]Burr McIntosh - Lafayette College[/li][li]Pramathesh Barua - Presidency College, Calcutta - B.Sc.[/li][li]Frank McGlynn, Sr. - University of California, Hastings College of the Law - Law[/li][li]Ralph Morgan - Columbia University - Law[/li][li]John Boles - University of Texas - B.A.[/li][/ul]
And some later actors from the 1930s and 1940s:
[ul]
[li]Madeleine Carroll - University of Birmingham - B.A.[/li][li]Robert Allen - Dartmouth College - English[/li][/ul]
Sonny Tufts. Yale graduate, and Tufts University was named for an ancestor of his.
Paul Robeson, of course.
Ronald Reagan, Eureka College class of 1932
Eddie Collins, baseball Hall of Famer, Columbia around 1908. He played minor league baseball before his graduation (a big no-no) under the name Sullivan
Eldred G. Peck, English and pre-med, UC Berkeley, ca. 1938. Dropped his first name and went into acting (having appeared in five plays his senior year.)
College wrestler Kirk Douglas graduated from St. Lawrence University before serving in WWII, and got his first Oscar nomination for Best Actor before the '40s were out.
Gene Kelly graduated from college before dropping out of law school in the '30s before hitting it big in Hollywood in the '40s.
Richard Widmark not only graduated from college in the '30s, but then stuck around for a couple of years as an instructor in the drama department before moving on to radio work and Broadway performances and then Hollywood stardom.
Joel McCrea and Robert Taylor were both graduates of Pomona College
Not sure if he meets everyone’s definition of “celebrity” but Dance Instructor Arthur Murray graduated from Georgia Tech in 1923
Close to the cut-off date, but Jack Lemmon graduated from Harvard in '47, coming back to finish after serving in WWII (although he wasn’t particularly famous till the 1950s)
Rudy Vallee, the great crooner. Yale, philosophy.
While enrolled he played sax in the “Yale Collegians” band along with Peter Arno, the *New Yorker * cartoonist.
His first band after graduation was called “Rudy Vallee and his Connecticut Yankees.”
According to some accounts, Buster Keaton was a brilliant student in high school, but went on to a jock college because he was chasing a girl who went there. He tried several sports to impress her, but he was a bad athlete. Eventually, however, through some unusual circumstances, he won her over and they married. Not sure if he ever graduated.
Ooooooooo you funny!
Great American Songwriter Cole Porter was also a Yale graduate, class of 1913.
The great José Ferrer didn’t earn his Oscar for playing Cyrano de Bergerac until 1950, but he’d already won the Tony for doing it on Broadway back in 1947 – sure as he’d already earned his first Oscar nomination in 1948 – so it was pretty obvious he could do it just as soon as he felt like getting around to it.
Anyhow, before all of that he starred as Philo Vance in the eponymous private-eye radio show, and before that he was pretty much the definitive Iago on stage; and before that he was a Princeton grad, Class of '33.
Should “celebrity” include athletes? Most football and basketball players played on college teams first, though I’m not familiar enough with either sport to name anyone before around 1960.
Sir Lawrence Olivier and Richard Burton both attended Oxford, but I can’t seem to pin down whether they got degrees or not.
Dave Brubeck graduated from the College of the Pacific in Stockton, California (now the University of the Pacific).
CELEBRITY athletes would count, folks like Muhammad Ali and Joe Namath. But not people who are only famous for being athletes.
I don’t think Dave Brubeck should count, because his professional career started after WWII. The Brubeck Octet only began recording in 1946.
Dana Andrews was a pretty danged big movie star in the '40s, after graduating from Sam Houston State University in 1930.