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: Trained as a musician, Virginia Gregg drew her first professional paychecks with the Pasadena Symphony. Gregg was sidetracked into radio in the 1940s, playing acting roles in an abundance of important California-based network programs. Her extensive radio credits include Gunsmoke, Suspense, Yours Truly Johnny Dollar, and Richard Diamond. Her first film was 1946's Notorious, directed by Alfred Hitchcock, who last cast Gregg as the voice of "Mother" in his classic chiller Psycho (1960). Virginia Gregg was most closely associated with the output of actor/producer/director Jack Webb: she co-starred in both of Webb's film versions of his popular radio and TV series Dragnet, and guest-starred in virtually every other episode of the 1967-70 Dragnet TV revival.

Trivia: According to her Rockford, Illinois, high-school yearbook, Barbara Hale hoped to make a career for herself as a commercial artist. Instead, she found herself posing for artists as a professional model. This led to a movie contract at RKO Radio, where she worked her way up from "B"s like The Falcon in Hollywood (1945) to such top-of-the-bill attractions as A Likely Story (1947) and The Boy With Green Hair (1949). She continued to enjoy star billing at Columbia, where among other films she essayed the title role in Lorna Doone (1952). Her popularity dipped a bit in the mid-1950s, but she regained her following in the Emmy-winning role of super-efficient legal secretary Della Street on the Perry Mason TV series. She played Della on a weekly basis from 1957 through 1966, and later appeared in the irregularly scheduled Perry Mason two-hour TV movies of the 1980s and 1990s. The widow of movie leading man Bill Williams, Barbara Hale was the mother of actor/director William Katt. Hale died in 2017, at age 94.

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: A native Californian, red-headed Kipp Hamilton (born Rita Hamilton) made an auspicious screen debut as Robert Stack's young wife in the Fox drama Good Morning Miss Dove (1955). She mainly played second leads thereafter but was extremely busy on television in such shows as Perry Mason, Rawhide, My Three Sons, and Dragnet.

Trivia: Film and television actor Sidney Clute amassed well over 100 big- and small-screen credits across a career lasting just over 30 years. As a result of his personal popularity and the friendships borne of his professionalism, Clute's credits extended for three years beyond his death in 1985. Born in Brooklyn, NY, in 1916, he began working professionally in summer stock productions, and didn't make the leap to film work until shortly after World War II. His movie debut came in an uncredited role in William Wyler's The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), playing a drugstore clerk. His next appearance on film was on the small screen, in an uncredited role in the first-season Adventures of Superman episode "Czar of the Underworld", first seen in 1953. None of the five film and television roles he had in 1953 -- in the series Racket Squad, Fritz Lang's The Big Heat, and Russell Rouse's Wicked Woman -- were credited, but they opened a three-decade career. He was busier in 1954, on the sitcom I Married Joan, the crime dramas Waterfront and The Lineup, and small roles in feature films, including Douglas Sirk's ancient-world costume drama Sign of the Pagan, playing a monk. And that was the shape of Clute's career for the next 25 years, individual days of work on series ranging from Westerns to melodramas, broken by the occasional feature-film role. He did have a recurring role on Steve Canyon as Crew Chief Sergeant Gerke, and producer/director Jack Webb used him in three episodes of Dragnet during the 1950s, but it was the action/adventure series Whirlybirds that kept Clute the busiest over its two seasons from 1957 through 1959. His bald head and hangdog features seemed to register well with audiences no matter which side of the law his characters were on, and his Brooklyn accent (which he could hide effectively) even worked well in Westerns. Directors and producers appreciated his ability to nail a character or a line in short order, as well as his genial personality behind the scenes. Clute was working more often in the 1960s, on Dick Powell Theatre, Wagon Train, Hogan's Heroes, Mannix, Ben Casey, Perry Mason, That Girl, and dozens of other series, though he was probably most visible in the revived series Dragnet, which used him in key supporting roles in seven episodes. His best part in that series was in "Public Affairs: DR-07", as a gun nut on a television talk show who takes an open microphone to express his opposition to California's licensing and registration laws. But his chameleon-like ability as an actor was showcased that same year with an appearance on Iron Horse, in the episode "Wild Track", as a duplicitous 19th century businessman involved in a high-stakes poker game on a train besieged by outlaws -- even those familiar with his work elsewhere could forget that it was the familiar face from Dragnet. Clute was just as active in the 1970s, jumping between theatrical thrillers such as Breakout and Executive Action and dozens of television series. Toward the end of the 1970s, he settled into recurring work on Lou Grant as the newspaper's national editor, and finally, in 1982, he landed a co-starring role in a successful series when he was cast as Detective Paul La Guardia in Cagney and Lacey. As the oldest member of the detective squad -- and the most sympathetic to the two female detectives of the title, played by Tyne Daly and Sharon Gless -- Clute was a memorable presence on the series for its first three seasons. He died suddenly in the fall of 1985 from an especially fast-moving form of cancer. In tribute to the actor, producer Barney Rosensweig, a good friend of Clute's, left his name and image in the credits and continued to have his character referred to as an active member of the squad for the remaining four seasons of the show.

Trivia: James Seay was groomed for romantic leads by Paramount Pictures beginning in 1940. After several nondescript minor roles, Seay finally earned a major part--not as a hero, but as a villainous gang boss in the Columbia "B" The Face Behind the Mask (1941). Never quite reaching the top ranks, Seay nonetheless remained on the film scene as a dependable general purpose actor, appearing in such small but attention-getting roles as Dr. Pierce, the retirement-home physician who explains the eccentricities of "Kris Kringle" (Edmund Gwenn) in Miracle on 34th Street (1947). In the 1950s, James Seay joined the ranks of horror and sci-fi movie "regulars;" he could be seen in films like The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), Killers from Space (1954), The Beginning of the End (1957), and--as the luckless military officer who is skewered by a gigantic hypodermic needle--The Amazing Colossal Man (1957).

Trivia: Actor Brett Halsey came into this world as Charles Oliver Hand, the son of a San Francisco contractor. Formerly a page at the CBS studios in Hollywood, the 20-year-old Halsey was signed to a Universal contract in 1953. His earliest film efforts include The Glass Web (1953) and Ma and Pa Kettle at Home (1954), in which he played one of the myriad of Kettle offspring. He went on to play leads in bottom-budget juvenile delinquent films, including the immortal 1958 howler Speed Crazy. Under contract to 20th Century-Fox in the late 1950s-early 1960s, Halsey starred in Return of the Fly (1959) and was seen on a weekly basis as swinging journalist Paul Templin in the TV series Follow the Sun (1961). He then packed his bags and headed to Italy, where he played leads in swashbucklers, spy films, and Westerns (occasionally under the pseudonym Montgomery Ford). His experiences as a journeyman actor in Europe were encapsulated in his novel Magnificent Strangers. Halsey returned to the U.S. in the early 1970s, where he acted in such TV daytime dramas as Love is a Many Splendored Thing, Search for Tomorrow and, General Hospital, as well as in feature films, including Francis Ford Coppolas' Godfather III (1990). Brett Halsey was at one time married to actress Luciana Paluzzi.

Trivia: Actor Stephen R. Ellsworth started out performing on a Mississippi showboat. He then went on to appear frequently on radio and television. Sometimes he also appeared in such films as Wild Heritage.

Trivia: Hearty character actor Ralph Sanford made his first screen appearances at the Flatbush studios of Vitaphone Pictures. From 1933 to 1937, Sanford was Vitaphone's resident Edgar Kennedy type, menacing such two-reel stars as Shemp Howard, Roscoe Ates, and even Bob Hope. He moved to Hollywood in 1937, where, after playing several bit roles, he became a semi-regular with Paramount's Pine-Thomas unit with meaty supporting roles in such films as Wildcat (1942) and The Wrecking Crew (1943). He also continued playing featured roles at other studios, usually as a dimwitted gangster or flustered desk sergeant. One of his largest assignments was in Laurel and Hardy's The Bullfighters (1945), in which he plays vengeance-seeking Richard K. Muldoon, who threatens at every opportunity to (literally) skin Stan and Ollie alive; curiously, he receives no screen credit, despite the fact that his character motivates the entire plot line. Busy throughout the 1950s, Ralph Sanford was a familiar presence on TV, playing one-shot roles on such series as Superman and Leave It to Beaver and essaying the semi-regular part of Jim "Dog" Kelly on the weekly Western Wyatt Earp (1955-1961).

Trivia: Jeanne Bates had acted in stock in California when, in 1942, she was signed to a Columbia Pictures contract. So far as many horror aficionados are concerned, her most significant work under the Columbia banner consisted of a pre-credits bit as Bela Lugosi's first victim in Return of the Vampire (1943) and the "haunted" heroine of Soul of a Monster (1944). Her other Columbia work ranged from the leading-lady stint in the 1942 serial The Phantom to a minor role in Death of a Salesman (1952). She worked steadily in television in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, most regularly as Nurse Wills on the weekly Ben Casey (1961-66). After accumulating some impressive credits in regional theater and as an acting instructor, Bates showed up as Mary's mother in the midnight-movie favorite Eraserhead (1978). Jeanne Bates' latter-day film appearances included small but worthwhile roles in Die Hard 2 (1992) and Grand Canyon (1992). Bates died of breast cancer at age 89 in November 2007.

Trivia: American character actor Paul Hahn appeared in a few low budget films from the mid to late '50s. Prior to that he worked frequently on early television both on programs and in commercials. Much later, Hahn became a stage manager.