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: American actress Jo Morrow made her first film appearance at age 16. Signed to a Columbia contract in 1958, she played such teen-queen roles as Mary Lou in Gidget and a rock 'n' roll-loving foreign princess in Juke Box Rhythm (1959). She was also featured in the Columbia releases The Legend of Tom Dooley (1959), 13 Ghosts (1960), Our Man in Havana (1960) and Three Worlds of Gulliver (1960). She retired in 1962, then returned to films ten years later in a brace of lower-rung horror films, Terminal Island (1972) and Dr. Death, Seeker of Souls (1973). Jo Morrow's last film role to date was as a barmaid in 1973's Blume in Love.

Trivia: Trained at Juilliard and the American Academy of Dramatic Art, actress Constance Towers made her first impression on the public as a film actress. Towers was seen as the resourceful Southern-belle leading lady of John Ford's The Horse Soldiers (1959), then essayed a similar characterization in Ford's Sergeant Rutledge (1960). For a brief period in the early 1960s, she was the pet actress of director Samuel Fuller, who effectively cast her in extremely demanding roles in Shock Corridor (1963) and The Naked Kiss (1965). With several film and TV appearances to her credit, Towers finally made her professional stage debut in a 1960 production of Guys and Dolls; one year later, she made her Broadway bow as star of Anya, a musicalization of Anastasia. Most closely associated with musicals, she has made hundreds of appearances in revivals of such Rodgers and Hammerstein classics as South Pacific, The King and I, and The Sound of Music. During the 1960s and 1970s, Constance hosted a daily discussion show on New York radio station WOR. On TV, Towers has been seen as Clarissa McCandliss, daughter of JR-type patriarch Rory Calhoun, on the daytime drama Capitol (1982-87), and as Camilla, the mother of ex-call girl Jade O'Keefe (Lisa Hartman), on the heavy-breathing nighttimer 2000 Malibu Road (1992). Constance Towers is married to former actor and U.S. diplomat John Gavin.

Trivia: The son of a New York University professor of marketing, American actor James Drury spent his youth dividing his time between Manhattan and Oregon, where his mother ran a ranch. At age 8, Drury made his stage debut as King Herod-- crepe beard and all--in a Christmas production at a Greenwich Village settlement house. Sidelined by polio at age 10, Drury became a voracious reader, often acting out the characters in the books. At NYU, Drury dove full-force into acting, developing his craft to such an extent that in 1954 he was signed by MGM. His film roles were of the "other guy in the room" calibre (Forbidden Planet [1956]), so Drury's contract lapsed, after which he spent time at 20th Century-Fox in support of Pat Boone (Bernardine [1957]) and Elvis Presley (Love Me Tender [1958]). In 1958, Drury was cast by Screen Gems studios in a TV pilot film based on the Owen Wister story The Virginian. It didn't sell, but in 1962 Universal optioned the rights to The Virginian, bringing Drury in along for the ride. He spent the next nine years in The Virginian, during which time Drury's reputation for recalcitrance on the set and reluctance to reveal anything of himself in interviews earned him the soubriquet "The Garbo of the Sagebrush" (a nickname bestowed by Drury's father!) James Drury wasn't seen much after The Virginian, though he did show up on the small screen as the lead in an Emergency clone titled Firehouse, which ran on the ABC network for eight months in 1974.

Trivia: Born in France, blonde leading lady Andrea King was educated in the United States. In 1944, King was signed to a Warner Bros. film contract. She spent much of her time in femme fatale assignments, with the occasional sympathetic lead in films like The Beast With Five Fingers (1946). The best of her Warners efforts was Hotel Berlin (1945), in which King plays a Nazi sympathizer who pays for her treachery when she is shot to death by underground operative Helmut Dantine. After her many tough, vitriolic 1940s assignments, it was a little depressing to watch King play a humorless Christian zealot in the 1952 sci-fier Red Planet Mars. Ostensibly retired by 1973, Andrea King made an unexpected but welcome return appearance in the off-the-wall comedy The Linguini Incident (1992).

Trivia: Diminutive Irish-American character actor Walter Burke kicked off his film career in 1948. Burke's weaselly, cigarette-dangling-from-lips characterization of political flunky Sugar Boy in the Oscar-winning All the King's Men (1949) set the tone for most of his later roles. Though often afforded meaty roles on television -- he was one of several actors who subbed for William Talman during the 1960-1961 season of Perry Mason -- Burke had no objection to accepting tiny but memorable bits, such as the cockney who warns Eliza Doolittle, "There's a bloke be'ind that pillar, takin' down every word that you're sayin'!" in the opening scene of My Fair Lady (1964). In another unbilled assignment, Burke convincingly voice-doubled for narrator Walter Winchell in a handful of early-'60s episodes of The Untouchables. Closing out his film career in the early '70s, Walter Burke moved to Pennsylvania, where he became an acting teacher.

Trivia: Bespectacled, dignified British stage actor Frederick Worlock came to Hollywood in 1938. During the war years, Worlock played many professorial roles, some benign, some villainous. A semi-regular in Universal's Sherlock Holmes series, he essayed such parts as Geoffrey Musgrave in Sherlock Holmes Faces Death (1943). Active until 1966, Frederick Worlock's final assignments included a voice-over in the Disney cartoon feature 101 Dalmations (1961).

Trivia: A balding former stage actor from Oregon, Irving Mitchell appeared in scores of films of the 1940s, often playing medical doctors, as in Citizen Kane (1941) and All-American Co-Ed (1941). Mitchell was also one of the suspects in the theft of Napoleon's jewels in Secrets of the Lone Wolf (1941) and one of the two duplicitous industrialists forced by Bela Lugosi to shoot and kill each other in Black Dragons (1942). Very busy in television shows such as Perry Mason and Maverick, Mitchell's last credited feature film was 1957's Jeanne Eagles, in which he played a lawyer.