Trivia: In the first ten years of his life, Raymond Burr moved from town to town with his mother, a single parent who supported her little family by playing the organ in movie houses and churches. An unusually large child, he was able to land odd jobs that would normally go to adults. He worked as a ranch hand, a traveling tinted-photograph salesman, a Forest service fire guard, and a property agent in China, where his mother had briefly resettled. At 19, he made the acquaintance of film director Anatole Litvak, who arranged for Burr to get a job at a Toronto summer-stock theater. This led to a stint with a touring English rep company; one of his co-workers, Annette Sutherland, became his first wife. After a brief stint as a nightclub singer in Paris, Burr studied at the Pasadena Playhouse and took adult education courses at Stanford, Columbia, and the University of Chunking. His first New York theatrical break was in the 1943 play Duke in Darkness. That same year, his wife Sutherland was killed in the same plane crash that took the life of actor Leslie Howard. Distraught after the death of his wife, Burr joined the Navy, served two years, then returned to America in the company of his four-year-old son, Michael Evan Burr (Michael would die of leukemia in 1953). Told by Hollywood agents that he was overweight for movies, the 340-pound Burr spent a torturous six months living on 750 calories per day. Emerging at a trim 210 pounds, he landed his first film role, an unbilled bit as Claudette Colbert's dancing partner in Without Reservations (1946). It was in San Quentin (1946), his next film, that Burr found his true metier, as a brooding villain. He spent the next ten years specializing in heavies, menacing everyone from the Marx Brothers (1949's Love Happy) to Clark Gable (1950's Key to the City) to Montgomery Clift (1951's A Place in the Sun) to Natalie Wood (1954's A Cry in the Night). His most celebrated assignments during this period included the role of melancholy wife murderer Lars Thorwald in Hitchcock's Rear Window (1954) and reporter Steve Martin in the English-language scenes of the Japanese monster rally Godzilla (1956), a characterization he'd repeat three decades later in Godzilla 1985. While he worked steadily on radio and television, Burr seemed a poor prospect for series stardom, especially after being rejected for the role of Matt Dillon on Gunsmoke on the grounds that his voice was too big. In 1957, he was tested for the role of district attorney Hamilton Burger in the upcoming TV series Perry Mason. Tired of playing unpleasant secondary roles, Burr agreed to read for Burger only if he was also given a shot at the leading character. Producer Gail Patrick Jackson, who'd been courting such big names as William Holden, Fred MacMurray, and Efrem Zimbalist Jr., agreed to humor Burr by permitting him to test for both Burger and Perry Mason. Upon viewing Burr's test for the latter role, Perry Mason creator Erle Stanley Gardner jumped up, pointed at the screen, and cried "That's him!" Burr was cast as Mason on the spot, remaining with the role until the series' cancellation in 1966 and winning three Emmies along the way. Though famous for his intense powers of concentration during working hours -- he didn't simply play Perry Mason, he immersed himself in the role -- Burr nonetheless found time to indulge in endless on-set practical jokes, many of these directed at his co-star and beloved friend, actress Barbara Hale. Less than a year after Mason's demise, Burr was back at work as the wheelchair-bound protagonist of the weekly detective series Ironside, which ran from 1967 to 1975. His later projects included the short-lived TVer Kingston Confidential (1976), a sparkling cameo in Airplane 2: The Sequel (1982), and 26 two-hour Perry Mason specials, lensed between 1986 and 1993. Burr was one of the most liked and highly respected men in Hollywood. Fiercely devoted to his friends and co-workers, Burr would threaten to walk off the set whenever one of his associates was treated in a less than chivalrous manner by the producers or the network. Burr also devoted innumerable hours to charitable and humanitarian works, including his personally financed one-man tours of Korean and Vietnamese army bases, his support of two dozen foster children, and his generous financial contributions to the population of the 4,000-acre Fiji island of Naitauba, which he partly owned. Despite his unbounded generosity and genuine love of people, Burr was an intensely private person. After his divorce from his second wife and the death from cancer of his third, Burr remained a bachelor from 1955 until his death. Stricken by kidney cancer late in 1992, he insisted upon maintaining his usual hectic pace, filming one last Mason TV movie and taking an extended trip to Europe. In his last weeks, Burr refused to see anyone but his closest friends, throwing "farewell" parties to keep their spirits up. Forty-eight hours after telling his longtime friend and business partner Robert Benevides, "If I lie down, I'll die," 76-year-old Raymond Burr did just that -- dying as he'd lived, on his own terms.

Trivia: Producer William Allyn was born in 1927 in New York, where he began his career in entertainment as an actor on the stage. He played opposite such notables as Marlon Brando and Julie Harris in theatrical roles before developing an interest in working behind the scenes. In the early '60s, he took up producing for television, eventually overseeing nearly 350 episodes of Peyton Place. In 1971, he moved up to producing movies for television, beginning with The Last Child, and in 1981, produced his first theatrical feature, Rich and Famous. He died from complications relating to heart disease in 1999.

Trivia: San Franciscan Will Wright was a newspaper reporter before he hit the vaudeville, legitimate stage, and radio circuit. With his crabapple face and sour-lemon voice, Wright was almost instantly typecast as a grouch, busybody, or small-town Scrooge. Most of his film roles were minor, but Wright rose to the occasion whenever given such meaty parts as the taciturn apartment house manager in The Blue Dahlia (1946). In one of his best assignments, Wright remained unseen: He was the voice of the remonstrative Owl in the Disney cartoon feature Bambi (1942). Will Wright didn't really need the money from his long movie and TV career: His main source of income was his successful Los Angeles ice cream emporium, which was as popular with the movie people as with civilians, and which frequently provided temporary employment for many a young aspiring actor.

Trivia: Voted a WAMPAS Baby Star in 1927 (the designation denoted starlets and not actual babies), brunette Patricia Avery did a couple of supporting roles and then retired to marry art director Merrill Pye.

Trivia: Straight out of Dartmouth College, Alan Hewitt made his Broadway bow in the 1935 Lunt/Fontanne production of Taming of the Shrew (which featured another newcomer, Cameron Mitchell). The wiry, sneering-voiced Hewitt appeared in several Theatre Guild productions of the 1930s and 1940s and later supported Ethel Merman in the 1950 musical Call Me Madam. He also served for many years as an official of the Actor's Union Council. During the 1960s, Hewitt became one of the Disney Studios' favorite actors, playing stereotypical self-important officials in such comedies as The Absent-Minded Professor (1960), Son of Flubber (1963) and The Misadventures of Merlin Jones (1967). Fans of 1960s sitcoms will remember Alan Hewitt as the ever-suspicious detective Bill Brennan on My Favorite Martian.

Trivia: Best described as a young George Kennedy type (though he and Kennedy were contemporaries), American actor Mort Mills spent three decades playing omniprescent and menacing types. He started out in films in the early '50s, showing up briefly in such productions as Affair in Trinidad (1952) and Farmer Takes a Wife (1955). He also seemed to be lurking in the background, taking in the information at hand and waiting to saunter over and pounce upon someone smaller than himself (which was just about everyone). Mills' character straddled both sides of the law: He was a friendly frontier sheriff in the 1958 syndicated TV western Man without a Gun and a less friendly police lieutenant on the 1960 network adventure weekly Dante; conversely, he was vicious western gunslinger Trigger Mortis in the 1965 Three Stooges feature The Outlaws is Coming. Mort Mills' most indelible screen moments occured in Hitchcock's Psycho (1960), wherein he portrayed the suspicious highway patrolman who almost catches embezzler Janet Leigh; had he succeeded, she would have spent the night in the pokey rather than the Bates Motel.

Trivia: Modeled in New York City to help pay for her acting classes with Stella Adler and Uta Hagen. Appeared with her then-husband, actor Dick Gautier, on the game shows Match Game and Tattletales. Considered her role as the future mother-in-law of Tom Hanks in Bachelor Party to be one of her favorites.

Trivia: A graduate of the University of Michigan, Strother Martin was the National Junior Springboard Diving Champion when he came to Hollywood as a swimming coach in the late 1940s. He stuck around Lala-land to play a few movie bits and extra roles before finally receiving a role of substance in The Asphalt Jungle (1950). Lean and limber in his early day, Martin was frequently cast in parts which called upon his athletic prowess (e.g. a drawling big-league ball player in 1951's Rhubarb). As his face grew more pocked and his body more paunched with each advancing year, Martin put his reedy, whiny voice and sinister squint to excellent use as a villain, most often in westerns. It took him nearly 20 years to matriculate from character actor to character star. In 1967, Martin skyrocketed to fame as the sadistic prison-farm captain in Cool Hand Luke: his character's signature line, "What we have here is a failure t' communicate," became a national catchphrase. While he continued accepting secondary roles for the rest of his career, Martin was awarded top billing in two sleazy but likeable programmers, Brotherhood of Satan (1971) and Ssssssss (1973). A veteran of scores of television shows, Strother Martin was seen on a weekly basis as Aaron Donager in Hotel De Paree (1959) and as star Jimmy Stewart's country cousin in Hawkins (1973).

Trivia: American comic character actor James Millhollin worked on and off-Broadway, in feature films, and most frequently on television during the '60s and '70s.

Trivia: Delightful hatchet-faced character comedian Elvia Allman made quite a few screen appearances in the 1940s but is today much better remembered for her television work. It was Allman who, as the factory foreman, introduced Lucy and Ethel to the chocolate assembly line in the classic 1951 I Love Lucy episode "Job Switching"; and she appeared in no less than three of the most fondly remembered situation comedies, playing memorable supporting roles: Cora Dithers in Blondie, Selma Plout in Petticoat Junction, and Elverna Bradshaw in The Beverly Hillbillies. Allman also created the voice for the Disney cartoon character Clarabelle Cow and played Aunt Sally in a 1981 television version of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

Trivia: A tough-looking hombre who briefly made life miserable for such stalwart serial stars as Reed Hadley and Donald Barry, Ernest Sarracino spent nearly six decades in front of the camera and hardly ever received on-screen credits. A regular performer in Republic serials of the early 1940s, usually cast as ethnic villains, Sarracino later played numerous bits in television shows ranging from The Adventures of Rin-Tin-Tin to Charlie's Angels. His final credited performance came in the Stephen King prison drama The Hudsucker Proxy (1994), in which he was Luigi, the tailor.

Trivia: The son of vaudeville monologist Julius Tannen, Charles Tannen launched his own film career in 1936. For the rest of his movie "life," Tannen was most closely associated with 20th Century Fox, playing minor roles in films both large (John Ford's The Grapes of Wrath) and not so large (Laurel and Hardy's Great Guns). Rarely receiving screen credit, Tannen continued playing utility roles well into the 1960s, showing up in such Fox productions as The Fly (1958) and Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (1961). Charles Tannen's older brother, William, was also an active film performer during this period.