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: Born Joanna Winnifrith, Anna Lee was a petite, charming, blond British actress. At age 14 she ran away from home to join a circus. After brief stage experience she began appearing in British films in 1932, playing leads and supporting roles; in 1940 she moved to Hollywood and began making films there. She is best remembered as Bronwyn Morgan, Roddy McDowall's sister-in-law, in How Green was My Valley (1941). Rarely onscreen after the late '60s, she had a regular role as Lila Quartermaine on the TV soap opera General Hospital. She married and divorced director Robert Stevenson. She was the widow of novelist/playwright/poet Robert Nathan and the mother of actors Jeffrey Byron and Venetia Stevenson.

Trivia: Classically handsome film leading man Neil Hamilton was trained in stock companies before making his 1918 film bow. He rose to stardom under the guidance of D. W. Griffith, who cast Hamilton in leading roles in The Great Romance (1919), The White Rose (1923), America (1924) and Isn't Life Wonderful? (1924). In an era when sturdy dependability was one of the prerequisites of male stardom, Hamilton was one of the silent screen's most popular personalities, as well suited to the role of faithful Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby (1925) as he was to the Foreign Legion derring-do of Beau Geste (1927). His pleasant voice and excellent diction enabled Hamilton to make the transition to sound with ease. Unfortunately, he always seemed a bit of a stick in his talkie portrayals, and it wasn't long before he found himself shunted off to "other man" assignments (Tarzan and His Mate) and villainous characterizations (The Saint Strikes Back). By the early 1940s, he had lost both fame and fortune -- and, as he'd ruefully observe later, most of his so-called industry friends. Only the love of his wife and his rock-solid religious convictions saw him through his darkest days. Hamilton made a comeback as a character actor, playing brusque, businesslike types in TV series like Perry Mason and Fireside Theatre. From 1966 through 1968, Neil Hamilton co-starred as poker-faced Commissioner Gordon on the TV series Batman.

Trivia: American actress Yvonne Craig trained for a ballet career from age 10 onward. While in high school, Yvonne was accepted by George Balanchine for the School of American Ballet, but she chose instead to tour with the Ballet Russe. Stopping over in Los Angeles, Ms. Craig was approached by a producer asking if she'd like to be in movies. She turned him down, but was more responsive to Hollywood after she later broke her contract with the Ballet Russe. Yvonne's first film was The Young Land (1957), but it remained on the shelf for two years, thus Eighteen and Anxious (1957) was the moviegoers' first introduction to the actress. The Young Land earned Yvonne a contract with Columbia pictures, where because of her exotic looks and flowing black hair she was cast in teen-aged "femme fatale" roles, such as the seductress in The Gene Krupa Story (1960) (though quite thin, she was actually larger than her frail Krupa co-star Sal Mineo, which caused a minor crisis when the script called for Mineo to hold Yvonne in his arms). Amidst movie assignments of off-and-on quality, Yvonne tested for West Side Story, but lost out to Natalie Wood. She did, however, hold the distinction of appearing with Elvis Presley twice in It Happened at the World's Fair (1962) and Kissin' Cousins (1964). In 1967, Yvonne was called upon to replace an incapacitated Mary Ann Mobley as Batgirl (aka Barbara Gordon) on the once-popular TV series Batman. Ms. Craig did her best in a sketchily written part, and was proud of the fact that she handled her motorcycle-riding scenes without a double, but Batman was on its last legs, and was cancelled in early 1968. When acting roles became repetitive--and few and far between--Yvonne drifted out of show business, making her last film in 1971. She co-produced industrial shows for a time, then went into the real estate business, where she did quite well for herself. Though she did appear (at the producer's request) in a low-budget video film in 1991, Yvonne Craig elected not to play the Hollywood Game anymore, and was content to limit her public appearance to film-fan conventions and Batman retrospectives. In 2009, she returned to show business, voicing a character in the animated Olivia series. Craig died in 2015, at age 78.

Trivia: Wiry-featured American actor Harry Townes usually played informers, small-time crooks, wrong-headed military officers or duplicitous businessmen. His acting career began while he was attending the University of Alabama; chancing upon a Birmingham performance by a touring stage company of Richelieu starring Walter Hampden, Townes impulsively decided to become a performer himself. Within three years, Townes had worked in a New England stock company and was costarring in a travelling production of that old theatrical warhorse Tobacco Road. After two decades of stage performances, Townes came to Hollywood to appear on NBC television's Matinee Theatre, averaging some 18 TV performances per year thereafter. His personal favorite TV assignment was GE Theatre's Christmas offering The Other Wise Man, although Twilight Zone fans would argue in favor of Townes' role as a petty con artist endowed with the ability to change his facial features in the 1959 episode "The Four of Us are Dying." Harry Townes' film credits include The Mountain (1956), The Brothers Karamazov (1958), Sanctuary (1961) and The Warrior and the Sorceress (1974). His one recurring TV role was as Russell Winston on the 1986-87 season of Knots Landing.

Trivia: Character actor James Bell has appeared in many films during his 40-year film career. He was usually cast as a sympathetic character. The Virginia-born Bell first attended the Virginia Polytechnic Institute before making his theatrical debut in 1921. Eleven years later he made his film debut in I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang. Most of the films he appeared in were made during the '40s and '50s.

Trivia: A stage actor since the 1920s, Kenneth MacDonald found the going rough in Hollywood until he published and distributed a pamphlet titled "The Case of Kenneth MacDonald." This little self-promotional book brought him to the attention of studio executives, and throughout the 1930s MacDonald could be seen as a mustachioed, mellifluous-voiced villain in scores of westerns and melodramas. His work in the Charles Starrett westerns at Columbia led to a lengthy association with that studio. From 1940 through 1954, MacDonald played featured roles in such Columbia productions as Island of Doomed Men (1940), Power of the Whistler (1945) and The Caine Mutiny (1954); he was also prominently cast in the studio's short subjects, especially in the comedies of the Three Stooges and Hugh Herbert, his most familiar role being that of a society criminal or shyster lawyer. During the 1960s, Kenneth MacDonald was a semi-regular on the Perry Mason TV series, playing a solemn judge.