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 spending three seasons with the Pasadena Playhouse, actor Robert Rockwell made his Broadway debut in Jose Ferrer's 1946 production of Cyrano de Bergerac, a job he landed on the strength of his dueling skills. Signed to a Republic Pictures contract in 1949, he starred in 11 films over a period of two years, including the infamous anti-Communist tract The Red Menace. From 1952 to 1955, he was seen as Mr. Philip Boynton, the stunningly handsome and incredibly naïve biology teacher on TV's Our Miss Brooks. So typecast was he by this role that he had some trouble finding work after the series' cessation, but the TV-Western boom came to his rescue in 1959, when he was cast as two-fisted frontier insurance investigator Sam Logan in The Man From Blackhawk. Active into the 1990s, Robert Rockwell could be seen in character roles in such TVers as Growing Pains and Beverly Hills 90210.

Trivia: American actor Richard Arlen was working as a messenger boy at Paramount studios in the early 1920s when he was injured in a slight accident; the story goes that Arlen went to the studio heads to thank them for their prompt medical care, whereupon the executives, impressed by Arlen's good looks, hired him as an actor. Whether the story is true or not, it is a fact that Arlen soon became one of Paramount's most popular leading men, earning a measure of screen immortality by costarring with Buddy Rogers and Clara Bow in the first-ever Oscar winning picture, Wings (1927). Arlen was memorably cast as a World War I flying ace, a part in which he felt uniquely at home because he'd been a member of the Royal Canadian Flying Corps during the "real" war (though he never saw any combat!) The actor retained his popularity throughout the 1930s, and when roles became harder to come by in the 1940s, he wisely invested his savings in numerous successful businesses. Keeping in character, Arlen was also part-owner of a civilian flying service, and worked as an air safety expert for the government during World War II. Still acting in TV and commercials into the 1960s, Richard Arlen was reunited with his Wings costar Buddy Rogers in an amusing episode of the TV sitcom Petticoat Junction.

Trivia: A former violinist, character actor Simon Oakland made his Broadway debut in 1948's The Skipper Next to God. Oakland's later stage credits include Light Up the Sky, The Shrike and Inherit the Wind. In films from 1957, Oakland was often cast as an outwardly unpleasant sort with inner reserves of decency and compassion. In I Want to Live (1958) for example, he played a journalist who first shamelessly exploited the murder trial of death-row inmate Susan Hayward, then worked night and day to win her a reprieve. And in Hitchcock's Psycho (1960), he had a memorable curtain speech as a jumpy, jittery, apparently neurotic psychiatrist who turned out to be the only person who fully understood transvestite murderer Anthony Perkins. Conversely, Oakland played his share of out-and-out villains, notably the bigoted Officer Schrank in West Side Story (1961). Far busier on television than in films--he once estimated that he'd appeared in 550 TV productions--Oakland was seen almost exclusively on the small screen after 1973. Within a five-year period, he was a regular on four series: Kolchak: The Night Stalker, Toma, Black Sheep Squadron and David Cassidy, Man Undercover. After a long losing bout with cancer, Simon Oakland died one day after his 63rd birthday.

Trivia: Jeanne Bal's career took her from important roles in the musicals of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II to the science fiction of Gene Roddenberry, all in less than 20 years. She was a natural fit in show business by temperament and birth. Born in 1928 in California, she was the daughter of Peter Bal, a scene designer at Monogram Pictures. By her own account, she was a gangly girl -- too tall and gawky until her final year of high school when she blossomed and developed an interest in acting. Bal attended Los Angeles City College until she was lured away by a role in Gypsy Lady, a musical that took her from Los Angeles to New York and then to London. She returned to New York after the show closed and discovered that she also made an excellent model on top of being an actress; she supported herself that way between shows. Bal appeared in a series of flops until George Abbott picked her for a role in Call Me Madam. She subsequently joined the cast of Guys and Dolls as Sarah Brown, replacing Jan Clayton during the Los Angeles run of its national tour. Bal later made her mark as Nellie Forbush in the national touring company of South Pacific. Bal married Russ Bowman, the show's stage manager, during the tour. In between stage engagements, Bal made numerous appearances on television during the '50s in comedy and drama, and sang at local night spots such as The Maisonette in the St. Regis Hotel in midtown Manhattan. In 1958, Bal became a regular on the Sid Caesar Show on ABC, doing sketches with Caesar and co-stars Imogene Coca and Carl Reiner. The following season she was a regular cast member of the situation comedy Love and Marriage, playing William Demarest's daughter. From there she returned to Broadway in the cast of The Gay Life, and during the early '60s appeared in such dramatic series as Perry Mason, Route 66, Wagon Train, and The Fugitive. In 1963, she was also a regular member of the cast of the series Mr. Novak, starring James Franciscus. Bal occasionally played romantic roles, such as a guest on the touching "Instant Family" episode of the sitcom Hey Landlord (co-created by Garry Marshall), in which she played a single mother with a child who becomes seriously involved with the young protagonist Woody Banner (Will Hutchins). But her most memorable television role was ultimately far-removed from (though intertwined with) romance: Bal had the honor in 1966 of portraying the first monster ever seen on Star Trek, in the episode "The Man Trap." She gave a bravura performance in the role of Nancy Crater, the one-time love of series regular Dr. Leonard McCoy (DeForest Kelley); the role was far more complex than that, however, for the being who appears to be Nancy Crater to the starship's landing party is actually the last surviving member of a predatory alien species that has adopted the guise of the woman, stalking members of the crew, killing them for the salt content of their bodies. Bal plays a this deadly, thirsting predator (and immensely strong, as we see when she tosses Leonard Nimoy across a room) and was convincingly vulnerable, loving, and even flirtatious, and intensely ferocious and savage, having a look of desperate hunger in her eyes. At other times, she was just bone-chilling as she switched from acting like "Nancy" to behaving as the "salt vampire," touching her victims' faces in a mysterious deadly caress, the purpose of which becomes horribly clear in the final two minutes. Bal retired from television and from acting at the outset of the '70s.

Trivia: The son of the Los Angeles Times' drama editor, William Schallert was, along with Sydney Chaplin, one of the co-founders of Hollywood's highly regarded Circle Theatre troupe. Sent to Great Britain on a Fulbright Fellowship to study British repertory theatre, Schallert guest-lectured at Oxford on several occasion before heading home. A character actor of almost intimidating versatility, Schallert began his long film and TV career in 1951. While he appeared in films of every variety, Schallert was most closely associated with the many doctors (mad or otherwise), lab technicians and scientific experts that he played in such science fiction endeavors as The Man From Planet X (1951), Gog (1954), Them! (1954) The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957) and The Monolith Monsters (1959). Director Joe Dante paid homage to Schallert's prolific horror-flick work by casting the actor in his Matinee, where he played yet another dabbler in Things Man Is Not Meant to Know in the film-within-a-film "Mant." Schallert's hundreds television credits could fill a book in themselves; the Nickelodeon cable network once tried to put together a montage of the actor's guest star appearances, touching only the tip of the iceberg. He was a regular on such series as Dobie Gillis (as literature teacher Mr. Pomfrit, who always dismissed his class as though announcing the beginning of the Indy 500), Get Smart (as a senile 97-year-old Navy admiral), The Nancy Drew Mysteries (as Nancy's attorney father) The New Gidget (as Gidget's professor father) The Nancy Walker Show, Little Women and Santa Barbara. His most famous TV role was as Patty Lane's ever-patient newspaper-editor dad on The Patty Duke Show, which ran from 1963 through 1966; over twenty years later, Mr. Schallert and Ms. Duke were touchingly reunited--again as father and daughter--on an episode of The Torkelsons (1991-92). William Schallert once served as president of the Screen Actors' Guild, a position later held...by Patty Duke. Shallert continued acting until the early 2010s; he died in 2016, at age 93.

Trivia: George Neise played character roles on stage, screen, and television. Born and raised in Chicago, Neise became an actor following service as a colonel in the Army Air Corps during WWII. Neise made his feature-film debut in They Raid by Night (I942). Though he would specialize in action-dramas and Westerns, Neise appeared in a wide range of roles ranging from comedy to drama to romance. Neise made his final film appearance in The Barefoot Executive (1971). On television, Neise has appeared on The Jackie Gleason Show, The Red Skelton Show, and The Loretta Young Show. Neise passed away in his Hollywood home on April 14, 1996.

Trivia: James B. Sikking (the "B" stands for Barrie, as in James M. Barrie, his parents' favorite author) was active in student theatricals at the University of California-Santa Barbara, UCLA and the University of Hawaii. Sikking's first film was 1963's The Strangler; his subsequent movie work found him alternating between punkish villains and steely authority types. His earliest regular TV stint was as Dr. James Hobart, one of Rachel Ames' many amours, on the daytime drama General Hospital. If we bypass his brief stint as cosmetics executive Geoffrey St. James in the mercifully short-lived 1979 sitcom Turnabout, we can regard Lt. Howard Hunter on Hill Street Blues as Sikking's first recurring prime-time TV characterization. Looking like a cross between George C. Scott and Roy Scheider on both of their bad days, Lt. Hunter was Hill Street Station's gonzo SWAT team leader, eager to prove his worth by blowing a hole in anyone who looks at him cross-eyed. It is to Sikking's credit that he invested this initially two-dimensional character with depth and humanity, so much so that Hunter caused viewers' hearts to skip a beat or two when he attempted suicide in a 1984 episode. Sikking remained with H.S.B. until its cancellation in 1987, moving on to such assignments as "The Old Man" in the Jean Shepherd-inspired cable flick Ollie Hopnoodle's Haven of Bliss (1989). From 1989 to 1993, Sikking co-starred as Dr. David Howser, father of 16-year-old medical genius Neil Patrick Harris, on the weekly sitcom Doogie Howser MD. James B. Sikking's recent film credits include the pompous Captain Styles in Star Trek 3: The Search for Spock (1984) and FBI chief Denton Voglers in The Pelican Brief (1994).