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: Vivacious, tart-tongued Broadway diva Vivienne Segal was never given her proper due by Hollywood -- far from it, in fact. Having been pushed upon the wicked stage at the age of 15 by a typical stage mother, Segal found fame and fortune as one of Broadway's most popular ingénues, reaching an early career high as Constance in Florenz Ziegfeld's 1928 production of Rudolph Friml's The Three Musketeers. The newly sound-equipped Warner Bros. immediately beckoned, but Song of the West and Bride of the Regiment and Golden Dawn (all 1930) were flops, the last mentioned of near cataclysmic proportions. If briefly down, Segal was far from out, rebounding as Countess Palaffi in Rodgers & Hart's 1938 I Married an Angel, in which she sang the plaintive "Spring Is Here," and as the slumming socialite Vera Simpson in Pal Joey, stopping that 1940 hit with the unforgettable "Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered." Lorenz Hart, otherwise not exactly known as a ladies' man, declared her his eternal devotion and wrote his final song especially for her, "To Keep My Love Alive." The occasion was the 1943 revival of A Connecticut Yankee and Segal made a devilishly attractive Morgan le Fay. Divorced from television executive Hubbell Robinson Jr., Segal spent her final years as a virtual recluse in a small house in Hollywood.

Trivia: Character actor Wesley Addy made his film debut in First Legion (1951). Often cast in cold, intimidating roles, Addy was a member in good standing of director Robert Aldrich's informal stock company. The actor was given plenty of elbow room in his supporting parts in Aldrich's Kiss Me Deadly (1955) and The Big Knife (1955), and had a memorable pre-credits bit as a migraine-prone movie producer ("Boy oh boy oh boy oh boy") in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962). Addy married actress Celeste Holm in 1961.

Trivia: Forced to flee his native St. Petersburg after the Bolshevik revolution, Russian-born actor Leonid Kinskey arrived in New York in 1921. At that time, he was a member of the Firebird Players, a South American troupe whose act consisted of dance-interpreting famous paintings; since there was little call for this on Broadway, Kinskey was soon pounding the pavements. The only English words he knew were such translation-book phrases as "My good kind sir," but Kinskey was able to improve his vocabulary by working as a waiter in a restaurant. Heading west for performing opportunities following the 1929 Wall Street Crash, Kinskey joined the road tour of the Al Jolson musical Wonder Bar, which led to a role in his first film Trouble in Paradise (1932). His Slavic dialect and lean-and-hungry look making him ideal for anarchist, artist, poet and impresario roles, Kinskey made memorable appearances in such films as Duck Soup (1933), Nothing Sacred (1937) and On Your Toes (1939). His best known appearance was as Sacha, the excitable bartender at Rick's Cafe Americain in Casablanca (1942). The film's star, Humphrey Bogart, was a drinking buddy of Kinskey's, and when the first actor cast as the barkeep proved inadequate, Bogart arranged for Kinskey to be cast in the role. During the Red Scare of the '50s, Kinskey was frequently cast as a Communist spy, either comic or villainous. In 1956 he had a recurring role as a starving artist named Pierre on the Jackie Cooper sitcom The People's Choice. Kinskey cut down on acting in the '60s and '70s, preferring to write and produce, and help Hollywood distribution companies determine which Russian films were worth importing. But whenever a television script (such as the 1965 "tribute" to Stan Laurel) called for a "crazy Russian", Leonid Kinsky was usually filled the bill.

Trivia: A stage actor since the 1920s, Kenneth MacDonald found the going rough in Hollywood until he published and distributed a pamphlet titled "The Case of Kenneth MacDonald." This little self-promotional book brought him to the attention of studio executives, and throughout the 1930s MacDonald could be seen as a mustachioed, mellifluous-voiced villain in scores of westerns and melodramas. His work in the Charles Starrett westerns at Columbia led to a lengthy association with that studio. From 1940 through 1954, MacDonald played featured roles in such Columbia productions as Island of Doomed Men (1940), Power of the Whistler (1945) and The Caine Mutiny (1954); he was also prominently cast in the studio's short subjects, especially in the comedies of the Three Stooges and Hugh Herbert, his most familiar role being that of a society criminal or shyster lawyer. During the 1960s, Kenneth MacDonald was a semi-regular on the Perry Mason TV series, playing a solemn judge.

Trivia: Philip Terry labored away as an oil-rig worker until enrolling at Stanford University, where the 6'1" San Franciscan distinguished himself on the football field. After college, Terry travelled to London to study acting, assuming that a British accent would automatically assure him good roles upon his return to America (it didn't). A nominal movie leading man at RKO and Paramount in the early 1940s, Terry managed to pick up a few good notices for his star turn in the 1941 western The Parson of Panamint. The following year, Terry became the third husband of superstar Joan Crawford (he'd been a bit player in Crawford's 1937 vehicle Mannequin, but was not formally introduced to the actress until four years later). A competent but bland screen presence, Terry tended to be overshadowed by his world-famous spouse. Though all reports indicate that the marriage was a happy one, Terry eventually chafed at being Mr. Joan Crawford, and in 1946 the couple was amicably divorced. In films until 1966, Philip Terry is best remembered for his portrayal of Wick Birman, the straight-arrow brother of alcoholic Ray Milland in The Lost Weekend (1945).

Trivia: Actress Barbara Perry began her career in the early 1930s, debuting in the 1933 movie Counselor-at-Law when she was just 10 years old. Her career would really kick into gear some years later, when the blonde beauty reached adulthood, appearing in several films and TV shows throughout the '40s and '50s, like The Thin Man, The Hathaways, and The Dick Van Dyke Show. Perry's filmography would continue to grow as the decades went on, and many would remember her for roles like Doris Williams on The Andy Griffith Show, Mrs. Thompson on My Three Sons, and Mrs. Bentley on Bewitched. She later appeared on shows like Newhart, Married...with Children, and How I Met Your Mother, and in movies like 1991's Father of the Bride, 1997's Just Write, and 2010's The Back-up Plan.

Trivia: American character actor Lew Brown has been appearing on stage, screen and television for over 50 years.