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: A leading light of network radio in the 1940s and 1950s, actor Parley Baer appeared on virtually every major program emanating from Los Angeles. Baer is most closely associated with the radio version of Gunsmoke, in which, from 1955 to 1961, he played Dodge City deputy Chester Proudfoot. Those who worked on Gunsmoke have had nothing but the kindest words for Baer, who endeared himself to his colleagues via his dedication, professionalism, and weekly purchase of donuts for the rehearsal sessions. The jowly, prematurely balding Baer began free-lancing in films around 1949. He played a number of small parts at 20th Century-Fox (his largest, and least typical, was the Nazi sergeant in 1957's The Young Lions), and later showed up in such films as Warner Bros.' Gypsy (1963) and Universal's Counterpoint (1993). On television, Baer portrayed Darby on The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, Mayor Stoner on The Andy Griffith Show (1962-63 season) and Mr. Hamble on the 1966 Red Buttons sitcom The Double Life of Henry Phyfe. Active into the 1990s--he was seen as the Senate Majority Leader in 1993's Dave--Parley Baer is most familiar to the public as the voice of commercialdom's Keebler Elf.

Trivia: One of the most prolific of the "Who IS that?"school of character actors, Dabbs Greer has been playing small-town doctors, bankers, merchants, druggists, mayors and ministers since at least 1950. His purse-lipped countenance and Midwestern twang was equally effective in taciturn villainous roles. Essentially a bit player in films of the 1950s (Diplomatic Courier, Deadline USA, Living It Up), Greer was given more screen time than usual as a New York detective in House of Wax (1953), while his surface normality served as excellent contrast to the extraterrestrial goings-on in Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) and It! The Terror from Beyond Space. A television actor since the dawn of the cathode-tube era, Greer has shown up in hundreds of TV supporting roles, including the "origin" episode of the original Superman series, in which he played the dangling dirigible worker rescued in mid-air by the Man of Steel. Greer also played the recurring roles of storekeeper Mr. Jones on Gunsmoke (1955-60) and Reverend Robert Alden on Little House on the Prairie (1974-83). Showing no signs of slowing down, Dabbs Greer continued accepting roles in such films as Two Moon Junction (1988) and Pacific Heights (1990) into the '90s. He died following a battle with kidney and heart disease, on April 28, 2007, not quite a month after his 90th birthday.

Trivia: The son of an Irish whiskey distiller, Brian Donlevy was 10 months old when his family moved to Wisconsin. At 15, Donlevy ran away from home, hoping to join General Pershing's purge against Mexico's Pancho Villa. His tenure below the border was brief, and within a few months he was enrolled in military school. While training to be a pilot at the U.S. Naval Academy, Donlevy developed an interest in amateur theatricals. He spent much of the early 1920s living by his wits in New York, scouting about for acting jobs and attempting to sell his poetry and other writings. He posed for at least one Arrow Collar ad and did bit and extra work in several New York-based films, then received his first break with a good supporting role in the 1924 Broadway hit What Price Glory?. Several more Broadway plays followed, then in 1935 Donlevy decided to try his luck in Hollywood. A frustrated Donlevy was prepared to head back to Manhattan when, at the last minute, he was cast as a villain in Sam Goldwyn's Barbary Coast. In 1936 he was signed to a 20th Century-Fox contract, alternating between "B"-picture heroes and "A"-picture heavies for the next few years. The most notable of his bad-guy roles from this period was the cruel but courageous Sgt. Markoff in Beau Geste (1939); reportedly, Donlevy deliberately behaved atrociously off-camera as well as on, so that his co-workers would come to genuinely despise his character. From 1940 through 1946, Donlevy was most closely associated with Paramount Pictures, delivering first-rate performances in such films as The Great McGinty (1940), Wake Island (1942), The Glass Key (1942) and The Virginian (1946). His own favorite role was that of the good-hearted, raffish con-artist in Universal's Nightmare (1942). In 1950, Donlevy took time off from films to star and co-produce the syndicated radio (and later TV) series Dangerous Assignment. He went on to introduce the character of Dr. Quatermass in two well-received British science fiction films, The Creeping Unknown (1955) and Enemy From Space (1957). Brian Donlevy left behind an impressive enough filmic legacy to put the lie to his own assessment of his talents: "I think I stink."

Trivia: Before his motion picture career DeCorsia was a radio actor ("March of Time," "That Hammer Guy," "The Shadow"). He made his film debut in 1948 with The Lady from Shanghai. DeCorsia generally played lead villain roles (Enforcer, Naked City, Slightly Scarlet) or he occasionally parodied those villainous types (Kettles in the Ozarks, Dance With Me Henry).

Trivia: The son of an Episcopal priest, John Gallaudet commenced his professional acting career after graduating from Williams College. He appeared on both Broadway and in stock opposite actors ranging from Fred Astaire to Helen Hayes. The slight, thinnish-haired Gallaudet spent several years in the 1930s as the resident character star of Columbia Pictures' "B" unit, playing everything from kindhearted doctors to serpentlike crooks. He owns the distinction of being one the few actors to ever "murder" Rita Hayworth, dispatching the lovely young actress with a poisoned baseball glove in the 1937 potboiler Girls Can Play. Active in films until the 1950s, John Gallaudet was well known and highly regarded throughout the film community for his off-camera vocation as a champion golfer.