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: According to her Rockford, Illinois, high-school yearbook, Barbara Hale hoped to make a career for herself as a commercial artist. Instead, she found herself posing for artists as a professional model. This led to a movie contract at RKO Radio, where she worked her way up from "B"s like The Falcon in Hollywood (1945) to such top-of-the-bill attractions as A Likely Story (1947) and The Boy With Green Hair (1949). She continued to enjoy star billing at Columbia, where among other films she essayed the title role in Lorna Doone (1952). Her popularity dipped a bit in the mid-1950s, but she regained her following in the Emmy-winning role of super-efficient legal secretary Della Street on the Perry Mason TV series. She played Della on a weekly basis from 1957 through 1966, and later appeared in the irregularly scheduled Perry Mason two-hour TV movies of the 1980s and 1990s. The widow of movie leading man Bill Williams, Barbara Hale was the mother of actor/director William Katt. Hale died in 2017, at age 94.

Trivia: Fans of the long-running CBS network soap opera Guiding Light will remember distinguished-looking actor William Roerick for playing Henry Chamberlain, the father of characters Vanessa Chamberlain Lewis and Quinton McCord Chamberlain from 1980 through his death in 1995, but his career extends much further back than that and includes many years as a highly regarded performer on Broadway and in Hollywood. Like many other actors, he received his basic training on stage. He made his debut in a 1936 production of Hamlet. During WWII, he was part of a touring production of Irving Berlin's This Is the Army; in 1943, he appeared in the film version. Roerick resumed his stage career and did not reappear in feature films until the mid-'50s, with The Harder They Fall (1956). He subsequently appeared sporadically in films until his final appearance in The Betsy (1978).

Trivia: The scion of a wealthy Detroit family, William Talman would later claim that he learned to "champion the underdog" while a member of his Episcopal church boxing team. In his 20s, Talman became an evangelist for the Moral Re-Armament Movement, and later made at stab at studying law. He drifted to New York, where, through the intervention of an actor friend of his father, he began picking up small stage roles. After extensive experience in New York and in the touring company of Of Mice and Men, Talman moved to Hollywood, where in 1949 he played his first important screen role as a gangster in Red, Hot and Blue (1949). At his best when his characters were at their worst, Talman developed into one of Tinseltown's most fearsome screen villains, never more so than when he played a psycho killer who slept with one eye open in the noir classic The Hitchhiker (1955). In 1957, Talman was cast as Hamilton Burger, the perennially losing District Attorney on the popular TV weekly Perry Mason. He remained with the series until March of 1960, when he was arrested for throwing a wild party where vast quantities of illegal substances were consumed. The Perry Mason producers had every intention of firing Talman from the series, but he was reinstated thanks to the loyal intervention of his co-stars -- particularly Raymond Burr, who threatened to quit the show if Talman wasn't given a second chance. William Talman was last seen on TV in a series of anti-smoking public service announcements; these spots were run posthumously, at Talman's request, following his death from lung cancer at the age of 53.

Trivia: A onetime opera singer, wizened, glowering American character actor Richard Hale spent most of his screen time playing small-town sourpusses. Many of his movie appearances were small and unbilled: he enjoyed larger assignments as outlaw patriarch Basserman in Preston Sturges' The Beautiful Blonde of Bashful Bend (1949), the Soothsayer in Julius Caesar (1953), and the father of the retarded Boo Radley (Robert Duvall) in To Kill a Mockingbird (1962). He also showed up with regularity on television, often cast as a taciturn farmer or hard-hearted banker on the many western series of the 1950s and 1960s. One of Hale's showier parts was in the Oscar-winning All The King's Men, as the father of the girl killed in an auto accident caused by the drunken son (John Derek) of demagogic Willie Stark (Broderick Crawford), his character name: Richard Hale.

Trivia: Already a character player in his 30s, American actor Robert Cornwaithe was frequently called upon to play scientific and learned types in such films as War of the Worlds (1953) and The Forbin Project (1971). He was also busy on TV, portraying lawyers, officials and the like on such series as The Andy Griffith Show, Batman (in the "Archer" episode with Art Carney), Gidget, Laverne and Shirley and The Munsters. Cornwaithe earned his niche in the Science Fiction Film Hall of Fame for his performance in The Thing (1951); grayed up, bearded, and looking suspiciously Russian, the actor played the foolhardy Professor Carrington, whose insipidly idealistic efforts to communicate with the extraterrestrial "Thing" nearly gets him killed. In honor of this performance, Robert Cornwaithe was cast as a similar well-meaning scientist in "Mant," the giant-insect film within a film in Joe Dante's Matinee (1993), wherein Cornwaithe shared screen time with two equally uncredited horror-film icons, William Schallert and Kevin McCarthy.

Trivia: Buxom (reportedly 39-24-35), blonde, and statuesque, Greta Thyssen (born Thygesen) is perhaps best remembered for her leg art -- nude and otherwise -- than for any film roles. Miss Denmark of 1952, Thyssen arrived in Hollywood in 1955 as one of several blondes to appear in the wake of Marilyn Monroe's increasing popularity. Thyssen actually doubled Monroe in Bus Stop before signing a stock contract with Columbia Pictures. However, she didn't become another Monroe -- or even a Jayne Mansfield -- for Harry Cohn but instead supported the Three Stooges in their final, and sadly inferior, two-reel comedies, in effect functioning as sort of a bustier, more flamboyant version of Christine McIntyre. Thyssen's association with the team proved longer lasting than anyone would have thought, the last of their shorts did not find a release until June 4, 1959. Elsewhere, Thyssen replaced June Wilkinson in the hit Broadway show Pajama Shorts and earned additional recognition for her, at the time, red-hot romance with Cary Grant. Onscreen, however, "Enticin' Thyssen" toiled in low-budget affairs such as the European-helmed "red scare" thriller The Beast of Budapest and the atrocious sci-fi melodrama Journey to the Seventh Planet (1962), the latter of which was partially filmed in the actress' hometown of Copenhagen, Denmark. She also appeared briefly as a bar girl in John Cassavetes' experimental Shadows (1960) and remained proud of the association, but the high-brow exposure led nowhere. Although Thyssen is still fondly remembered by connoisseurs of pin-up art, her screen career eventually fizzled out with such alarming titles as The Double-Barrelled Detective Story (1965) and Cottonpickin' Cotton Pickers (1967).

Trivia: Russell Garcia started out in music as a child prodigy, teaching himself the cornet, as well as how to read music, while still a young boy. He later received formal training with figures such as Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, and got his first formal job in music through the radio, taking a conductor's spot on a popular program. Best known since the 1950s as a conductor, composer, arranger, and trumpeter, he has worked with figures such as Roy Eldridge, Stan Kenton, et al. He also spent more than a decade at Universal Pictures as an arranger and composer in their music department. He had two early low-budget composing credits at the outset of the 1950s, but it wasn't until the early '60s that Garcia got to show his real abilities in this area, on a proper cinematic canvas, with the scores for a pair of George Pal-produced fantasy films, The Time Machine and Atlantis, the Lost Continent. Those soundtracks might well have established him as an important name in the scoring of such genre movies, but he was never able to follow them up, and apart from two subsequent scoring credits (one of them a Western) in the middle of the 1960s, Garcia's major film composing career was limited to that pair of George Pal productions.

Trivia: American actor Morris Ankrum graduated from the University of Southern California with a law degree, then went on to an associate professorship in economics at the University of California at Berkeley. Here he founded a collegiate little theatre, eventually turning his hobby into a vocation as a teacher and director at the Pasadena Playhouse. (He was much admired by his students, including such future luminaries as Robert Preston and Raymond Burr.) Having already changed his name from Nussbaum to Ankrum for professional reasons, Ankrum was compelled to undergo another name change when he signed a Paramount Pictures contract in the 1930s; in his first films, he was billing as Stephen Morris. Reverting to Morris Ankrum in 1939, the sharp-featured, heavily eyebrowed actor flourished in strong character roles, usually of a villainous nature, throughout the 1940s. By the 1950s, Ankrum had more or less settled into "authority" roles in science-fiction films and TV programs. Among his best known credits in this genre were Rocketship X-M (1950), Red Planet Mars (1952), Flight to Mars (1952), Invaders From Mars (1953) (do we detect a subtle pattern here?), Earth Vs. the Flying Saucers (1956) and From the Earth to the Moon (1958). The fact that Morris Ankrum played innumerable Army generals was fondly invoked in director Joe Dante's 1993 comedy Matinee: the military officer played by Kevin McCarthy in the film-within-a-film Mant is named General Ankrum.

Trivia: Character actor, onscreen from 1951.

Trivia: In films from 1941, American character actor Norman Leavitt spent much of his career in uncredited bits and supporting roles. Leavitt can briefly be seen in such "A" pictures of the 1940s and 1950s as The Inspector General (1949) and Harvey (1950). His larger roles include Folsom in the 1960 budget western Young Jesse James. Three Stooges fans will immediately recognize Norman Leavitt from The Three Stooges in Orbit (1962), in which he player scientist Emil Sitka's sinister butler--who turned out to be a spy from Mars!

Trivia: American actor George Eldredge began surfacing in films around 1936. A general hanger-on in the Universal horror product of the 1940s, Eldredge appeared in such roles as the village constable in Ghost of Frankenstein (1942) and the DA in Calling Dr. Death (1943). His bland, malleable facial features enabled him to play everything from tanktown sheriffs to Nazi spies. Devotees of the "exploitation" films of the 1940s will remember Eldredge best as Dan Blake in the anti-syphilis tract Mom and Dad (1949). George Eldredge was once again in uniform as a small-town police chief in his final film, Hitchcock's Psycho (1960)

Trivia: Slim, sloe-eyed, dark-haired actress Gail Patrick was once the 21-year-old Dean of women students at her alma mater of Howard College, and briefly studied law at University of Alabama. She was brought to Paramount during that studio's nationwide contest to find an actress to play "the Panther Woman" in Island of Lost Souls (1932). Patrick lost this role to Kathleen Burke, but won a Paramount contract, and co-starred in the studio's horror film follow-up to Island of Lost Souls, 1933's Murders in the Zoo. She played several leading roles -- including a lady lawyer in Disbarred (1939) -- but was more effective as a villainess or "other woman"; her elegant truculence was one of the highlights of the 1936 screwball comedy My Man Godfrey. Patrick's third husband was Thomas Cornwall Jackson, literary agent of Perry Mason creator Erle Stanley Gardner. Retired from acting since 1948, Patrick and her husband co-produced the popular Perry Mason TV series, which ran from 1957 through 1966. She made a brief return to acting as a judge in the final Mason episode, which also featured Erle Stanley Gardner himself in a bit role. After her 1969 divorce from Jackson, Patrick attempted to revive Paul Mason for television in 1973, but Monte Markham proved an inadequate substitute for Raymond Burr. Gail Patrick Jackson died of leukemia in 1980.

Trivia: American screenwriter and producer Stirling Silliphant is best remembered for his Oscar-winning screenplay for In the Heat of the Night (1967), but during his career, he wrote or helped write over 200 scripts for films and even more television scripts. Other notable Silliphant scripts include Village of the Damned (1962), The Poseidan Adventure (1972), and The Towering Inferno (1974). In 1968, his script for Charly, the film adaptation for the play Flowers for Algernon, helped win Cliff Robertson his Best Actor Oscar. The Detroit native graduated from the University of California and in 1938 became a publicist for Disney and then moved to Twentieth Century Fox to become an assistant for president Spyros Skouras. Silliphant was in the military during WWII and afterward worked in a New York division of Fox. He did not return to Hollywood until the early '50s, after his first novel, Maracaibo, had become a best-seller. Silliphant performed his first duties as a producer for Universal's The Joe Louis Story. Frustrated by hold-ups on the script, Silliphant swore he could do better and decided that he too would become a scriptwriter. He started out in television writing scripts for series ranging from Route 66 to Alcoa Theatre to Perry Mason. He made his film-scriptwriting debut with Five Against the House (1955). Silliphant significantly boosted the career of martial arts master Bruce Lee when he created a large part for him in Marlowe (1969). A serious student of Buddhism, Silliphant and his wife, Tianna (aka Thi Thanh Nga), a Vietnamese director/actress, moved to Bangkok, Thailand, to study their religion. There were also rumors that Silliphant was tired of Hollywood and the trend to value money-making potential over artistry. Silliphant died in Bangkok after a long illness at the age of 78.

Trivia: Chances are when a doctor made a house call in a '40s movie, that doctor was portrayed by Sam Flint. Silver-haired, authoritative, and distinguished by an executive-style moustache, Flint entered films in the early '30s after a long stage career. Though his movie roles were usually confined to one or two scenes per picture, Flint was always instantly recognizable in his characterizations of businessmen, bankers, chairmen of the board, politicians, publishers, fathers of the bride--and, as mentioned before, doctors. In addition to his prolific feature-film work, Sam Flint was always welcome in short subjects, appearing in support of everyone from Our Gang to the Three Stooges.