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: "Everyman" American character actor Ross Elliot established himself on Broadway, served in World War II, returned to the stage, and made his film bow in 1948. Elliot's many movie appearances include minor roles in such science-fiction favorites as Beast From 20,000 Fathoms (1953) and Tarantula (1955). A prolific television performer, Elliot lost count of his video appearances after he passed the one-hundred mark. From 1967 to 1970, Ross Elliot was seen as Sheriff Abbott on the TV western The Virginian.

Trivia: Actor William Ching started out as a professional singer. Following WW II, he appeared in stage musicals such as Rodgers and Hammerstein's Allegro and Son of Scheherazade. In 1947, he appeared in the film version of the latter and then signed with Republic where he went on to make close to 20 films. He later began appearing frequently on early television shows. Ching retired in the late 1950s.

Trivia: American actor Vaughn Taylor was trained as a certified public accountant at Northeastern University. While performing in college theatricals, Taylor entertained notions of a stage career; he won a scholarship at the Leland Powers School of Theatre, but his resources were so low that he had to sell his blood to blood banks to pay his expenses. Steady stock, tent-show, and radio work convinced Taylor that he'd made the right career move, and upon completing his Army duties in 1945, the actor took on the new challenge of live television. Taylor played so many TV roles that it is fruitless to try to list them, though the first "couch potato generation" might have affectionate memories of the actor as sharp-witted janitor Ernest P. Duckweather on the 1953 satirical puppet show Johnny Jupiter. (Taylor was replaced by Wright King when the series went from live to film). Taylor was also a prominent "summer repertory" actor on the prestigious anthology Robert Montgomery Presents from 1952 through 1954. The movies utilized Taylor's talents, often in roles as duplicitous executives or crooked business partners: he was the two-timing showman beheaded by magician Vincent Price in The Mad Magician (1954). Anyone who follows the reruns of The Twilight Zone will be more than familiar with the skill and range of Vaughn Taylor: he played bookworm Burgess Meredith's hardhearted boss in "Time Enough at Last," a crazed old conjurer in "Still Valley," an unctuous robot salesman in "I Sing the Body Electric" and a kindly wheelchair-bound gent who sells his kindness and becomes a killer in "The Self-Improvement of Salvatore Ross."

Trivia: Actress Jeanne Cooper entered films in 1953. Though she worked often, Cooper appeared in only a handful of memorable movies, including the rare Roger Corman social-protest film The Intruder (1961) and The Boston Strangler (1968). She was seen to better advantage on television, guesting in a wide range of roles on such series as The Twilight Zone and The Man From U.N.C.L.E. From 1969 to 1970, she was seen as Grace Douglas on the prime-time "inside Hollywood" series Bracken's World. She is best known for her ongoing characterization of Kay Chancellor on the CBS soap opera The Young and the Restless. Unlike many other daytime-drama actresses, who prefer to keep their onscreen characters and actual personalities separate, Cooper has invested many of her own life experiences in the role of Kay Chancellor. She harked back on her own bout with alcoholism to realistically portray Kay's recovery from a chronic drinking problem; and, when Jeanne underwent a facelift, so did Kay -- complete with in-progress shots of the actual operation. Jeanne Cooper is the mother of actor Corbin Bernsen. She passed away at age 84 in 2013.

Trivia: Over her long career, Lillian Bronson played numerous small character roles in a wide variety of films. The New York City native made her screen debut in The Happy Land (1943) starring Don Ameche. After many film appearances, she branched out into television, working as a regular on shows like Kings Row, where she played Grandma from 1955 to 1956, and Date With the Angels between 1957 and 1958. Bronson also guest starred on numerous television shows, especially Westerns like The Rifleman, Have Gun Will Travel, and The Guns of Will Sonnett.

Trivia: Former radio actress Martha Wentworth played the Duchess, Allan Lane's robust-looking aunt, in seven of Republic Pictures' popular Red Ryder Westerns from 1946-1947. The original Duchess, Alice Fleming, had left the series along with William Elliott, who was being groomed for Grade-A Westerns. As the new Duchess, Wentworth joined Lane, Elliott's replacement, and little Bobby Blake (later Robert Blake), the former Our Gang star, who played Indian sidekick Little Beaver in all the Republic Red Ryder films. For a great majority of the series' fans, the Lane-Wentworth-Blake combination turned out the quintessential Red Ryder films, the trio becoming one of the most successful combinations in B-Western history. Republic sold the Red Ryder franchise to low-budget Eagle-Lion in 1948 and four additional films were produced, but Wentworth was replaced with former silent-action heroine Marin Sais. In her later years, Wentworth did quite a bit of voice-over work for Walt Disney.