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: Educated at the Pratt Institute, Brooklyn-born Bill Williams broke into performing as a professional swimmer. Williams went on to work as a singer/actor in regional stock and vaudeville before making his film bow in 1943. After World War II service, he was signed by RKO Radio Pictures, which gave him the star buildup with such 1946 releases as Till the End of Time and Deadline at Dawn. Also in 1946, he wed another RKO contractee, Barbara Hale, with whom he co-starred in A Likely Story (1948) and Clay Pigeon (1949). His film career on the wane in the early 1950s, Williams signed up to star in the weekly TV western The Adventures of Kit Carson, which ran from 1952 to 1955. After the cancellation of Kit Carson, he remained active in television starring opposite Betty White in the 1955 sitcom Date with the Angels and showing off his athletic and aquatic prowess in the 1960 Sea Hunt clone Assignment: Underwater. He stayed active into the 1980s, playing rugged character roles. Bill Williams was the father of actor William Katt, star of the 1980s adventure weekly The Greatest American Hero.

Trivia: Rita Lynn found success on Broadway starring in an early '40s production of Walk Into My Parlour before making the jump to feature films in The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1944). Subsequent entries in her sporadic career include A Bell for Adano (1945) and East Side, West Side (1949). In addition to films, Lynn often appeared on television as a guest star on series ranging from Philco Playhouse, to The Phil Silvers Show, to Big Valley, and Search for Tomorrow.

Trivia: Rugged-looking American actor John Bryant is best remembered as the original "Marlboro Man" from the 1950s. He went on to play Dr. Robert Spaulding on the TV western, The Virginian. Bryant has subsequently played numerous character roles on a variety of television series ranging from westerns through sitcoms. He has appeared on Broadway and on stages throughout the country. Bryant also acted in films during the '50s and '60s.

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: An honor student in high school, American actor John Howard was also an accomplished pianist, and, in this capacity, won a position in the musical department at Cleveland radio station WHK. While appearing in a stage production at Case Western Reserve University, Howard was spotted by a Paramount talent scout and signed for films. Looking much older than his 26 years, the actor assumed the role of suave adventurer Bulldog Drummond in a series of seven B-movies beginning in 1937. The first actor to play Drummond in sound pictures was Ronald Colman, and it was with him whom Howard co-starred in his most famous film, Lost Horizon (1937). Howard played Colman's younger brother, whose recklessness led to the classic scene in which Margo, playing a woman spirited away from Shangri-La by Howard, aged 50 years before viewers' eyes. Modern day audiences watching the film aren't always very kind to the actor, laughing uproariously at his fevered histrionics; but he was the first to admit in latter-day interviews that he was overacting -- in fact, he was rougher on himself than any audience had been. Otherwise, Howard's film roles were played competently, if not colorfully, although he certainly deserved some credit for convincingly reacting to and making love with the Invisible Woman in the 1941 film comedy of the same name. Howard also became a pioneer of sorts when, in 1947, he starred in Public Prosecutor, the first filmed television series. Eight years later, the actor enjoyed a two-season run on the syndicated hospital drama Dr. Hudson's Secret Journal, in which all traces of the Lost Horizon ham were completely obliterated by his calm, persuasive performance. He starred in a third TV series filmed in 1958, Adventures of the Sea Hawk, but it wasn't aired until 1961 and turn out to be a flop. Howard was philosophical about his acting career, noting that he was always somewhat indifferent about stardom (although he did dearly covet the role of Ashley Wilkes in Gone With the Wind [1939], which ultimately went to Leslie Howard). The actor was, however, justifiably proud of his performance as Katharine Hepburn's wealthy, stuffed-shirt fiancé in The Philadelphia Story (1940) and his 1953 Broadway debut in Hazel Flagg. The next 30 years of his career were divided between mostly unremarkable movies and television productions. Completely out of the film business by the mid-'70s, Howard taught Drama and English at a private high school in Brentwood, CA, for the rest of his life. He died in 1995.

Trivia: Lanky character actor Tom Fadden first trod the boards when he joined an Omaha stock company in 1915. Fadden went on to tour in top vaudeville with his actress wife Genevieve. From 1932 to 1939, he was seen on Broadway in such productions as Nocturne and Our Town. He made his first film in 1939. Fadden's better-known screen roles include the tollhouse keeper in It's a Wonderful Life (1946)--which led to choice appearances in subsequent Frank Capra productions--and "possessed" townman Ira in Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956). In 1958, he was seen on a weekly basis as Silas Perry on TV's Cimarron City. Tom Fadden's cinematic swan song was 1977's Empire of the Ants.

Trivia: Authoritative, sandy-haired character actor Willis Bouchey abandoned a busy Broadway career in 1951 to try his luck in films. Bouchey's striking resemblance to Dwight D. Eisenhower enabled him to play roles calling for quick decisiveness and unquestioned leadership; he even showed up as the President of the United States in 1952's Red Planet Mars, one year before the "real" Ike ascended to that office. The actor's many judge, executive, military, and town-marshal characterizations could also convey weakness and vacillation, but for the most part there was no question who was in charge when Bouchey was on the scene. A loyal and steadfast member of the John Ford stock company, Willis Bouchey was seen in such Ford productions as The Long Gray Line (1955), The Last Hurrah (1958), Sergeant Rutledge (1960), Two Rode Together (1961), The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), and Cheyenne Autumn (1962).