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: After making her first film appearance at age 13, Josephine Hutchinson attended the Cornish School of Music and Drama. A leading Broadway actress of the late 1920s, Hutchinson was most closely associated with the title role in Eva Le Gailliene's Civic Repertory Company production of Alice in Wonderland. Her impeccable credentials notwithstanding, Hutchinson's earliest movie publicity emphasized the fact that hers was the longest name of any movie leading lady. She spent most of her first filmmaking decade at Warner Bros., acting opposite Dick Powell, Pat O'Brien, and, in The Story of Louis Pasteur (1936), Paul Muni. At Universal, she played the wife of Basil Rathbone in The Son of Frankenstein (1939), an experience she cherished primarily because of the warm camaraderie between her co-stars Rathbone, Boris Karloff and Lionel Atwill. Josephine Hutchinson worked steadily in films and television into the 1970s, most often playing firm, forceful elderly women.

Trivia: From his appearance as Humphrey Bogart's son in the Casablanca follow-up A Passage to Marseille to his career as the writer of films including They Saved Hitler's Brain (1968), actor-turned-screenwriter Gerald Perreau-Saissine's (aka Peter Miles) tenure in film and television provided audiences with both memorable characters and intriguing stories. Born in Tokyo and raised in Los Angeles, Saissine made his feature debut as a baby in Murder Will Out (1939). Saissine would appear in such features as Heaven Only Knows (1947), Special Agent (1949), and Quo Vadis? (1951) throughout the 1950s before making his screenwriting debut with the sci-fi-thriller Madmen of Mandoras (aka They Saved Hitler's Brain) in 1963. Frequently appearing onscreen with sister Gigi Perreau, the siblings remained in close contact with producer Samuel Goldwyn, who would later present Saissine with two Samuel Goldwyn writing awards. In addition to his film work, Saissine published novels and poetry; he also created numerous catalogues of Japanese woodblock print artists and curated their shows at such locations as the Pacific-Asia Museum in Pasadena and the Honolulu Academy of Arts. On August 3, 2002, Gerald Perreau-Saissine died of cancer in his Los Angeles home. He was 64.

Trivia: Following studies at the Theatre Guild, Linda Watkins made her Broadway debut when she was only 16 years old. She subsequently became a major theatrical star and played both leading ladies and ingénues. During the early '30s, she appeared in a few films, but she did not achieve the same popularity and so returned to the stage until the late '50s when she became a screen character actress.

Trivia: American general purpose actor Arthur Space was active in films from 1940. Tall, tweedy, and usually sporting a mustache, Space played just about every kind of supporting role, from Western banker to big-city detective to jewel thief. One of his largest film roles was as the delightfully eccentric inventor Alva P. Hartley in the 1944 Laurel and Hardy vehicle The Big Noise. As busy on television as in films, Arthur Space was seen on a weekly basis as Herbert Brown, the father of horse-loving teenager Velvet Brown, in the TV series National Velvet (1960-1961).

Trivia: Broadway actor Richard Gaines made his initial film appearance as Patrick Henry in The Howards of Virginia (1940). Gaines is best-known to modern audiences as Jean Arthur's stuffy suitor C. J. Pendergast in George Stevens' The More the Merrier (1942). Less pompous but no less dignified were his performances as George Washington in DeMille's Unconquered (1947) and Professor Jackson in Flight to Mars (1953). Either by accident or design, Richard Gaines made most of his last screen appearances at MGM, playing DAs, doctors and other briskly professional types.

Trivia: American general purpose actor Harlan Warde came to films in 1941 and remained before the cameras until the mid-'60s. During WWII, Warde played many a young man in uniform. Afterwards, he showed up in supporting roles as detectives, doctors, and ministers. One of Harlan Warde's last assignments was the recurring part of Sheriff Brannon on the TV Western series The Virginian (1962-1971).

Trivia: Probably no one came by the label "Runyon-esque" more honestly than Polish-born actor George E. Stone; a close friend of writer Damon Runyon, Stone was seemingly put on this earth to play characters named Society Max and Toothpick Charlie, and to mouth such colloquialisms as "It is known far and wide" and "More than somewhat." Starting his career as a Broadway "hoofer," the diminutive Stone made his film bow as "the Sewer Rat" in the 1927 silent Seventh Heaven. His most prolific film years were 1929 to 1936, during which period he showed up in dozens of Warner Bros. "urban" films and backstage musicals, and also appeared as the doomed Earle Williams in the 1931 version of The Front Page. He was so closely associated with gangster parts by 1936 that Warners felt obligated to commission a magazine article showing Stone being transformed, via makeup, into an un-gangsterish Spaniard for Anthony Adverse (1936). For producer Hal Roach, Stone played three of his oddest film roles: a self-pitying serial killer in The Housekeeper's Daughter (1938), an amorous Indian brave in Road Show (1940), and Japanese envoy Suki Yaki in The Devil With Hitler (1942). Stone's most popular role of the 1940s was as "the Runt" in Columbia's Boston Blackie series. In the late '40s, Stone was forced to severely curtail his acting assignments due to failing eyesight. Though he was totally blind by the mid-'50s, Stone's show business friends, aware of the actor's precarious financial state, saw to it that he got TV and film work, even if it meant that his co-stars had to literally lead him by the hand around the set. No one was kinder to George E. Stone than the cast and crew of the Perry Mason TV series, in which Stone was given prominent billing as the Court Clerk, a part that required nothing more of him than sitting silently at a desk and occasionally holding a Bible before a witness.