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: Alternately blonde and brunette, American actress Nancy Kovack entered films with a Columbia contract in 1960. She had several good scenes as an imbibing suburbanite in Strangers When We Meet (1960), was killed off after an elaborate strip-tease in the Dean Martin spy spoof The Silencers (1966) and at one point even got to play Medea, albeit briefly, in the juvenile-oriented adventure film Jason and the Argonauts (1963). One of Nancy's oddest (but best remembered) Columbia assignments was as Annie Oakley in the Three Stooges' western comedy The Outlaws is Coming (1965) - in which her leading man, a gun-shy Easterner, was a pre-Batman Adam West. Despite the seductive nature of many of her screen roles, Ms. Kovack offscreen was well known for her sturdy moral values and her unwillingness to be sucked in by the Hollywood "swingers" scene. Nancy Kovack married Los Angeles Philharmonic orchestra conducter Zubin Mehta early in the '70s, briefly maintaining her career under her married name but ultimately giving up acting to become a charming and highly respected social leader in New York and Los Angeles musical circles.

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: Manhattan native Bartlett Robinson headed to Los Angeles in the mid-'30s for the express purpose of becoming a radio actor. He appeared in innumerable soap operas and anthologies, and starred as Erle Stanley Gardner's super-lawyer Perry Mason in a 1943 radio series. His stage credits on both coasts included Sweet River, Merchant of Yonkers, and Point of No Return. In films from 1956 to 1973, he was often cast as doctors and military officials. Bartlett Robinson's TV credits include the recurring roles of Willard Norton in Wendy and Me (1964) and Frank Campbell in Mona McCluskey (1965).

Trivia: Best known for his roles on such television dramas as Dallas and the macabre Dark Shadows, actor Dennis Patrick also carried the distinction of being the small screen's first vampire. Born in Philadelphia, PA, in March 1918, Patrick began a prolific and enduring television career with roles in Star Tonight and Kraft Television Theater. Subsequently appearing in a handful of features and a slew of made-for-television movies, Patrick's roles in Dark Shadows and Dallas brought him the greatest success of his career. Married to actress Barbara Carson, Patrick was left a widower following his wife's death in 1990. On October 13, 2002, Dennis Patrick died in a home fire in the Hollywood Hills with his dog by his side. He was 84.

Trivia: Classically-trained dancer, and actress on stage, screen and television, Phyllis Hill got her start professionally dancing with the Metropolitan Opera ballet company and then joined the ballet corps at the Radio City Music Hall. From there she began playing dramatic roles in theater and this lead her to Broadway. Hill eventually became a performer in the international road-production of Rosalinda. Hill was a television actress in the mid 1950s and may be best remembered for playing Mrs. Dawson for many years on General Hospital. From the mid-'60s through the early '70s, Hill was also a regular on That Girl.

Trivia: American character actress Gertrude Flynn started out playing innocent young girls on Broadway during the 1930s. She made her film debut in 1954 with Barefoot Contessa and continued appearing periodically in films through the mid-1960s. Flynn made her final film appearance in 1984 in Bad Manners.

Trivia: Baby-faced second lead Don Dubbins began his film career at Columbia, playing young military types in From Here to Eternity (1953) and The Caine Mutiny (1954). Film star James Cagney took a liking to Dubbins, and saw to it that the young performer was prominently cast in Cagney's These Wilder Years (1956) and Tribute to a Bad Man (1956). Maturing into a dependable character actor, Dubbins later appeared in such films as The Prize (1963), The Illustrated Man (1969) and Death Wish II (1976). After nearly a decade in retirement, Don Dubbins died at the age of 63.