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: 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: When college-hero-handsome Jess Barker was signed by producer Walter Wanger in 1935, he was billed as Philip Barker in such Wanger productions as Trail of the Lonesome Pine (1936). He re-emerged as Jess Barker in the early 1940s, heading the casts in a handful of long-forgotten programmers. In Abbott and Costello's The Time of Their Lives (1946)., Barker plays the aristocratic fiance of Marjorie Reynolds. Barker is perhaps best known as the first husband of actress Susan Hayward; their 10-year union produced twin sons, whose custody Susan won after a bitter courtroom battle. His movie career damaged by adverse publicity, Jess Barker worked for a while in radio, then returned to the screen as a character actor in such films as Night Walker (1965).

Trivia: Launching his career in South American films and television programs, Argentinean actor Alejandro Rey spent most of his professional life in Hollywood. At first just another handsome Latin type, Rey emerged into a dynamic character actor, as witness his solid performance as Russian immigrant Robin Williams' attorney/protector in Moscow on the Hudson (1984). Rey's television activities included directing dozens of episodic TV programs. Alejandro Rey is most familiar to 1960s TV addicts for his three-year stint as Puerto Rican nightclub owner Carlos Ramirez in the Sally Field vehicle The Flying Nun.

Trivia: After a forgettable film debut in 1952's My Cousin Rachel, Irish leading lady Audrey Dalton was "introduced" with a blitz of publicity in The Girls of Pleasure Island (1953). Of the three toothsome heroines in this harmless sex farce (the others were Joan Elan and Dorothy Bromley), Audrey was the only one to go on to any kind of lasting career, perhaps due to her solid training at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts. She later appeared in the The Monster That Challenged the World (1957) or Mister Sardonicus (1961), but was more successful on her many TV guest appearances of the 1960s.

Trivia: Character actor, onscreen from 1959.

Trivia: Linda Lawson was a singer/actress who enjoyed a busy career from the end of the 1950s until the start of the 1970s. Born in Ann Arbor, MI, in 1936, she was three when her family moved to Fontana, CA, and she began singing while still a child. By the end of her teen years, she'd turned professional and had even managed to land an engagement at the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas. Her singing and her memorably dark, voluptuous good looks, coupled with some natural acting ability, led to Lawson getting roles on such series as 77 Sunset Strip, Maverick, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, One Step Beyond, M Squad, The Rifleman, and Sea Hunt in her early twenties, and she made the jump to feature films in 1960 with a role in the thriller The Threat. She also found time to record an excellent jazz-pop album during this period, but eventually acting supplanted singing as the focus of her career. Lawson's best screen role was in her second film, as the doomed, tormented Mora in Curtis Harrington's hauntingly beautiful Night Tide (1961). She remained busy throughout the 1960s, including a regular role on Adventures in Paradise for one season, and on series such as The Virginian, interspersed with occasional feature-film work, and she married producer John Foreman (1925-1992), who subsequently became business partners with actor Paul Newman. Lawson's last major screen role was in Newman's Sometimes a Great Notion (1971). She wasn't seen on the screen for several decades after that, but her daughters, Julie Foreman and Amanda Foreman, entered the movie business during the start of the 21st century; Lawson was seen again onscreen in the made-for-television feature Another Woman's Husband (2000) and in a 2005 episode of ER.

Trivia: Born into a poor San Francisco family, Raymond Bailey dropped out of school in the 10th grade to help make ends meet. He took on a variety of short-term jobs before escaping his lot by hopping a freight to New York. He tried in vain to find work as an actor, eventually signing on as a mess boy on a freighter. While docked in Honolulu, Bailey once more gave acting a try, and also sang on a local radio station. In Hollywood from 1932 on, Bailey took any nickel-and-dime job that was remotely connected to show business, but when World War II began, he once more headed out to sea, this time with the Merchant Marine. Only after the war was Bailey able to make a living as a character actor on stage and in TV and films. In 1962, he was cast as covetous bank president Milburn Drysdale on The Beverly Hillbillies, a role that made him a household name and one which he played for nine seasons (ironically, he'd once briefly worked in a bank during his teen years). After the show was cancelled in 1971, Bailey dropped out of sight and became somewhat of a recluse.

Trivia: American character actor Pitt Herbert appeared on stage, screen, television and in commercials. He got his start on stage and during the '30s and '40s appeared on Broadway. He has also worked as a director and a drama instructor. Later Herbert was an active member of the Screen Actors Guild legislative committee and helped to pass Chapter 1217 of the Unemployment Compensation/Pension Refund Act.