Yes, but the OP specified 1950 as the cut-off date.
Looking through a bunch of actor bios in the past hour, one thing kept popping up: they all gt their big break while they were college-aged, whether in college or not. You kind of stop being the “new hot boy on the street” at 21, and most degree recipients are at least 22. Faced with an acting contract in the Depression/War years, few sane actors would have said “Not 'til I finish my BFA, Mr. Zanuck!”
James Mason “earned a first” at Cambridge, I have no idea what the hell that means. Apparently some kind of a degree in the British aristocracy vernacular.
Josephine Hull: Radcliffe, 1899
Frank Capra: California Institute of Technology, 1918
Jessica Dragonette: Mount St. Mary College, 1923 (now Georgian Court University)
Charles Starrett: Dartmouth, 1926
Vincent Price: Yale, 1933
Julia Child graduated from Smith College in 1934, although she wasn’t a public figure for another 27 years.
Baseball’s Branch Rickey got his B.A. From Ohio Wesleyan in 1903. Remembered more as a front office man, he did play and holds the record for most stolen bases allowed in a game as a catcher with 13.
Don Ameche graduated from the University of Wisconsin before getting top-billed in plenty of stuff during the '40s.
Another Rutgers graduate is Ozzie Nelson of Ozzie and Harriet fame. He graduated from Rutgers undergraduate and also from Rutgers law school.
USC grad Buster Crabbe was Tarzan and Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon.
Ozzie Nelson also played the saxophone and led a successful dance band in the 1930s and '40s.
He proudly said “Yeah, we were white, but we could SWING.”
Leading man Adolphe Menjou – who was up for the Oscar for THE FRONT PAGE, and who got stuck with Shirley Temple in LITTLE MISS MARKER, and who was Billy Flynn opposite Ginger Rogers as ROXIE HART, and et cetera – was a Cornell grad.
Robert Ryan was up for Best Supporting Actor for his role in 1947’s CROSSFIRE, and so on throughout the 1940s: he was second-billed, as the Sundance Kid, to Randolph Scott in RETURN OF THE BAD MEN; and second-billed to Laraine Day, in I MARRIED A COMMUNIST; and second-billed to Merle Oberon, in BERLIN EXPRESS; and second-billed to Pat O’Brien, in MARINE RAIDERS; and second-billed to Van Heflin, in ACT OF VIOLENCE; and so on.
Anyhow, in '49 he got a top-billed role in THE SET-UP, as a past-his-prime boxer getting paid to take a dive – which made a lot of sense, since he’d been the boxing champ at Dartmouth back when he was earning his degree there in the '30s.
After serving in the Army in WWI Randolph Scott attended both Georgia Tech and UNC but did not graduate.
Randolph Scott?
<singing> RANDOLPH SCOTT! </singing>
Which Mrs. B., a UOP conservatory graduate, never lets me forget.
Moe Berg graduated from Princeton with a B.A. in modern languages.
Impressive. But what makes him a celebrity, other than being the rare Jewish baseballer?
If we’re going to include guys who started working toward a degree before dropping out, this list is going to get plenty longer; off the top of my head, John Wayne famously left school when an injury sidelined his college football career.
At that: James Whitmore stopped playing football for Yale due to injuries, but stuck around to graduate – and then served in the USMC during WWII, and then got his big break in Hollywood in '49, impressing folks with the role that would earn him his first Oscar nomination (after he’d already won a Tony on Broadway).
Because Moe Berg was a spy and tasked to assassinate Heisenberg if he was too close making a Bomb. He wasn’t.
After his playing days, in addition to his working for the OSS, he was still popular enough that he made a radio broadcast in fluent Japanese for them to not get involved in a war which they had zero possibility of winning. Presumably he picked up the language while touring the country with Babe Ruth and others in '34.
Casey Stengal called Berg “the strangest man ever to play baseball,” but that was before the '62 Mets.
Well, shit! Why didn’t you say so in the first place?
Now I’m going to spend the rest of the evening immersed in Moe Berg trivia.