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: Heavy-built major star of the silent era, Bushman was once known as "the handsomest man in the world." He began acting with stock companies while still a boy, remaining a stage actor until he entered film in 1911, beginning with the Essanay company in Chicago. At one time a sculpter's model, Bushman had a beautiful physique which, combined with his handsome looks, soon propelled him to stardom in pre '20s silents; he rushed from one movie set to another, playing romantic leads in scores of films and becoming immensely popular with female viewers. His popularity took a nose-dive, however, after it was revealed that he had been secretly married to actress Beverly Bayne, his costar in many films including Romeo and Juliet (1916). He continued to perform in numerous films, leading up to his most famous role as the Roman Massala (Ramon Novarro's screen rival) in the silent Ben-Hur (1926). During the silent era he made more than a million dollars a year, but his fortune was entirely lost in the Crash of 1929. By the early '30s his film career was all but over, though he rebuilt himself financially by becoming a star of radio soap operas. After 1930 he appeared in films only sporadically, though some of his roles were still of interest. His last appearance was in a schlocky low-budget '60s production, The Ghost in the Invisible Bikini (1966, the year of his death).

Trivia: An alumnus of the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, Brooklyn-born Hayden Rorke became a member of the original Walter Hampden theatrical company in the early '30s (he ended up the last surviving member of that hardy troupe). While serving in WWII, Rorke appeared in both the road company and film versions of the all-serviceman musical This Is the Army. He would make 70 Broadway appearances in his career, in additional to some 50 films and nearly 400 TV shows. Though usually unbilled, Rorke was instantly recognizable in roles calling for erudition and urbanity, notably in such films as An American in Paris (1951) and The Robe (1953). Among his many TV assignments was the role of CBS radio announcer John Daly (though his character was not identified by name) in the Pearl Harbor episode of the CBS historical series You Are There; he also co-starred in the two-part pilot for an intriguing 1951 science fiction series Project Moonbase, which didn't make it as a series but was released as a theatrical feature. Still essaying small movie roles into the 1960s, Hayden Rorke finally achieved a fame (and generous screen time) in the continuing role of flustered air force psychiatrist Dr. Bellows on the fanciful TV sitcom I Dream of Jeannie (1965-1970).

Trivia: Beckman is a stocky character actor, onscreen from the '50s.

Trivia: American actor Francis de Sales appeared on stage, screen, radio and television. He got his start on Broadway as one of the original "Dead End" kids. He later starred in his own radio series and from there moved into television until the late 1950s when he started his film career. De Sales continued appearing in films through the mid '70s.

Trivia: Producer William Allyn was born in 1927 in New York, where he began his career in entertainment as an actor on the stage. He played opposite such notables as Marlon Brando and Julie Harris in theatrical roles before developing an interest in working behind the scenes. In the early '60s, he took up producing for television, eventually overseeing nearly 350 episodes of Peyton Place. In 1971, he moved up to producing movies for television, beginning with The Last Child, and in 1981, produced his first theatrical feature, Rich and Famous. He died from complications relating to heart disease in 1999.

Trivia: Berry Kroeger (pronounced "Kroger", not "Kreeger") got his start in network radio, where his velvety voice was heard announcing several major dramatic anthologies; he also played a variety of leading radio roles, including the heroic soldier-of-fortune The Falcon. While appearing on Broadway in Saint Joan, Kroeger was discovered by filmmaker William Wellman, who cast the actor in The Iron Curtain. This 1948 Cold-War film represented the first of many unsympathetic movie assignments for Kroeger, ranging from the smarmy Packett in director Joseph L. Lewis' Gun Crazy (1949) to the mad-scientist mentor of Bruce Dern in The Incredible Two Headed Transplant (1971). Kroeger's marked resemblance to Sydney Greenstreet served him well when he essayed a Greenstreet take-off in "Maxwell Smart, Private Eye," an Emmy-winning episode of TV's Get Smart. Most of Barry Kroeger's film characters can be summed up in a single word: slime.

Trivia: Actor Grandon Rhodes worked steadily on stage, television, and in over 40 films during his four-decade career. On television, he had recurring roles on Bonanza (as a doctor) and Perry Mason.

Trivia: Lanky character actor Tom Fadden first trod the boards when he joined an Omaha stock company in 1915. Fadden went on to tour in top vaudeville with his actress wife Genevieve. From 1932 to 1939, he was seen on Broadway in such productions as Nocturne and Our Town. He made his first film in 1939. Fadden's better-known screen roles include the tollhouse keeper in It's a Wonderful Life (1946)--which led to choice appearances in subsequent Frank Capra productions--and "possessed" townman Ira in Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956). In 1958, he was seen on a weekly basis as Silas Perry on TV's Cimarron City. Tom Fadden's cinematic swan song was 1977's Empire of the Ants.

Trivia: American actress Betty Farrington worked in Hollywood from 1929 to 1949, mostly at Paramount and mostly in minor roles. Farrington's screen appearances frequently went uncredited, even when she played such pivotal roles as the malevolent ghost of Mary Meredith in The Uninvited (1943). She occasionally enjoyed larger assignments at other studios like Republic and 20th Century-Fox. For example, Betty Farrington was given ample screen time as Mrs. Al Smith in Fox's The Dolly Sisters (1945).

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.