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: Sharp-featured character actor James Griffith set out in life to be a professional musician. He eased into acting instead, working the little-theatre route in his hometown of Los Angeles. In 1939, Griffith appeared in his first professional production, They Can't Get You Down. Following World War II service, he made his first film, Black Ice (1946). Steadily employed in westerns, James Griffith was generally cast as an outlaw, save for a few comparative good-guy assignments such as Sheriff Pat Garrett in The Law vs. Billy the Kid (1954).

Trivia: According to her Rockford, Illinois, high-school yearbook, Barbara Hale hoped to make a career for herself as a commercial artist. Instead, she found herself posing for artists as a professional model. This led to a movie contract at RKO Radio, where she worked her way up from "B"s like The Falcon in Hollywood (1945) to such top-of-the-bill attractions as A Likely Story (1947) and The Boy With Green Hair (1949). She continued to enjoy star billing at Columbia, where among other films she essayed the title role in Lorna Doone (1952). Her popularity dipped a bit in the mid-1950s, but she regained her following in the Emmy-winning role of super-efficient legal secretary Della Street on the Perry Mason TV series. She played Della on a weekly basis from 1957 through 1966, and later appeared in the irregularly scheduled Perry Mason two-hour TV movies of the 1980s and 1990s. The widow of movie leading man Bill Williams, Barbara Hale was the mother of actor/director William Katt. Hale died in 2017, at age 94.

Trivia: Mississippi-born Mary Ann Mobley won the 1959 Miss America crown by singing a medley consisting of an aria from Madame Butterfly and the pop hit "There'll Be Some Changes Made." Within a year, Mary Ann was featured vocalist on the CBS TV variety series Be Our Guest; she then plunged into a series of youth-oriented theatrical films. Her movie leading men were an odd assortment, ranging from Elvis to Jerry Lewis. Far busier on TV than in films, Mary Ann was a guest on virtually every important prime-time dramatic series of the 1960s; she later played a recurring role on the ABC daytimer General Hospital, and in 1985 replaced Dixie Carter in the part of Conrad Bain's wife on the weekly sitcom Diff'rent Strokes. Trivia cultivators are fond of citing the two plum TV roles that Mary Ann was up for but didn't get; secret agent April Dancer on The Girl From UNCLE (she played the role in the pilot episode, but the series proper starred Stefanie Powers) and Batgirl-aka-Barbara Gordon on Batman (Yvonne Craig took over when Mary Ann fell ill). Mary Ann Mobley married to actor/talkshow host Gary Collins in 1967; the two remained together until Collins death in 2012. Mobley passed away in 2014, at age 75.

Trivia: Six-foot granite-jawed Anthony Eisley came into his own as a leading man on television in the late 1950s and early 1960s, before switching to more demanding and complex character and supporting roles. The son of a corporate executive, he was born Frederick Glendinning Eisley in Philadelphia, PA in 1925. He spent most of his childhood moving with his family as his father's various positions took them from city to city, every few years. He was bitten by the acting bug early in life, but had no serious was of pursuing a career in the field until he joined a stock company in Pennsylvania. He began getting theater roles after that and by the early 1950s had begun working in television and feature films, the latter usually uncredited, under the name Fred Eisley -- this also included his first series work, in Bonino (1953), starring Ezio Pinza and a young Van Dyke Parks. While his theater work included such prime fare as Mister Roberts and Picnic, when it came to movies and television he was in every kind of production there was, from independent, syndicated TV series such as Racket Squad to high-profile movies like The Young Philadelphians, and Eisley broke through to star billing in the Roger Corman-directed horror film The Wasp Woman (1960) (working opposite Susan Cabot in the title role). Around that same time he took the role of John Cassiano in Pete Kelly's Blues (1959), a short-lived TV series directed and produced by Jack Webb. It was after being seen in a stage production of Who Was That Lady that Eisley was cast as Tracy Steele, the tough ex-cop turned private detective in the series Hawaiian Eye. It was also with that series that he became Anthony Eisley. Following the three-year run of that series, Eisley resumed work as a journeyman actor, but the array of roles that he took on improved exponentially -- in one episode of The Dick Van Dyke Show, entitled "The Lady And The Tiger And The Lawyer", he guested as a seemingly affable, attractive new neighbor of the Petries who admits, in the end, that he has a problem with spousal abuse that prevents him from choosing either of the women they've aimed at him at a possible match; and in Samuel Fuller's groundbreaking film drama The Naked Kiss, he plays a hard-nosed cop who uncovers a sinister, deeply troubling side to his city's much-publicized children's hospital and the people behind it. Eisley appeared in dozens of television series and movies over the ensuing three decades, always giving 100% of himself even when the budget and the production were lacking (see The Navy Vs. The Night Monsters . . . .. But on the sets of television shows, especially, where the quality was there, his work was without peer -- that was one reason that Jack Webb, who had used him in Pete Kelly's Blues, made Eisley a part of his stock company, using him in six episodes of Dragnet in the 1960s. Those shows are especially fascinating to watch for the quiet intensity of his performances -- he mostly played morally-compromised character, including a man plotting the murder-for-hire of his wife, an affable but corrupt police lieutenant, and career criminal who thinks (incorrectly) that he has outsmarted the detectives who are questioning him. Eisley's credits, in keeping with his image from Hawaiian Eye, were heavily concentrated in series devoted to law enforcement. He continued working through the 1990s, and died of heart failure in 2003, at the age of 78.

Trivia: Rita Lynn found success on Broadway starring in an early '40s production of Walk Into My Parlour before making the jump to feature films in The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1944). Subsequent entries in her sporadic career include A Bell for Adano (1945) and East Side, West Side (1949). In addition to films, Lynn often appeared on television as a guest star on series ranging from Philco Playhouse, to The Phil Silvers Show, to Big Valley, and Search for Tomorrow.

Trivia: American actor Paul Lukather played supporting roles on television, stage, and in feature films during the '50s and '60s.

Trivia: Baby-faced second lead Don Dubbins began his film career at Columbia, playing young military types in From Here to Eternity (1953) and The Caine Mutiny (1954). Film star James Cagney took a liking to Dubbins, and saw to it that the young performer was prominently cast in Cagney's These Wilder Years (1956) and Tribute to a Bad Man (1956). Maturing into a dependable character actor, Dubbins later appeared in such films as The Prize (1963), The Illustrated Man (1969) and Death Wish II (1976). After nearly a decade in retirement, Don Dubbins died at the age of 63.

Trivia: American character actor Harry Holcombe was involved in radio, television and in feature films during the '60s and '70s. Films appearances include The Silencers, The Manchurian Candidate, The Graduate and Fun with Dick and Jane. During the '80s, Holcombe appeared in television commercials.

Trivia: Character actress Sarah Selby came to films by way of radio. In fact, her first screen assignment was a voice-over as one of the gossiping elephants in Disney's animated feature Dumbo (1941). She continued to play minor roles as nurses, housekeepers, and town gossips until her retirement in 1977; one of her last roles was Aunt Polly in a 1975 TV-movie adaptation of Huckleberry Finn. On television, Sarah Selby was seen on a semi-regular basis as storekeeper Ma Smalley on Gunsmoke (1955-1975).

Trivia: Even when she was only in her early forties, Isabel Randolph specialized in middle-aged "grand dame" roles on stage and radio, continuing in this vein when she entered films in 1940. Randolph gained nationwide popularity as the pompous Mrs. Uppington (aka "Uppy") on radio's Fibber McGee and Molly. She re-created this character onscreen in RKO's Look Who's Laughing (1941) and Here We Go Again! (1942), and in the Republic cornpone musical O, My Darling Clementine (1943). She went on to play scores of small roles in A-pictures and major assignments in B's; in at least one Republic Western of the early '50s, she was cast radically against type as a criminal mastermind. On TV, Isabel Randolph was seen as private-school proprietress Mrs. Nestor during the final (1955-1956) season of Our Miss Brooks.

Trivia: Eddie Quillan made his performing debut at age seven in his family's vaudeville act. By the time he was in his teens, Quillan was a consummate performer, adept at singing, dancing, and joke-spinning. He made his first film, Up and At 'Em, in 1922, but it wasn't until 1925, when he appeared in Los Angeles with his siblings in an act called "The Rising Generation," that he began his starring movie career with Mack Sennett. At first, Sennett tried to turn Quillan into a new Harry Langdon, but eventually the slight, pop-eyed, ever-grinning Quillan established himself in breezy "collegiate" roles. Leaving Sennett over a dispute concerning risqué material, Quillan made his first major feature-film appearance when he co-starred in Cecil B. DeMille's The Godless Girl (1929). This led to a contract at Pathé studios, where Quillan starred in such ebullient vehicles as The Sophomore (1929), Noisy Neighbors (1929), Big Money (1930), and The Tip-Off (1931). He remained a favorite in large and small roles throughout the 1930s and 1940s; he faltered only when he was miscast as master sleuth Ellery Queen in The Spanish Cape Mystery (1936). Among Quillan's more memorable credits as a supporting actor were Mutiny on the Bounty (1935), Young Mr. Lincoln (1939), The Grapes of Wrath (1940), and Abbott and Costello's It Ain't Hay (1943). From 1948 through 1956, Quillan co-starred with Wally Vernon in a series of 16 two-reel comedies, which showed to excellent advantage the physical dexterity of both men. Quillan remained active into the 1980s on TV; from 1968 through 1971, he was a regular on the Diahann Carroll sitcom Julia. In his retirement years, Eddie Quillan became a pet interview subject for film historians thanks to his ingratiating personality and uncanny total recall.

Trivia: Lisa Davis was one of 1950's cinema's most attractive supporting players. Born Cherry Ann Davis in 1936 to a performing family -- her father was the renowned British bandleader Harry Davis, her mother a chorus girl -- she made her screen debut in 1941, at age five. Her older sister Beryl Davis subsequently found success as a singer, working first with their father's band, and later with Django Reinhardt and Glenn Miller, amongst many others, before coming to America and working with Frank Sinatra. The younger Davis sibling attended the Arts Educational School while continuing to get roles on-screen, and in 1947 portrayed Jean Siimmons' character as a child in the film Woman In The Hall. Three years later, she was considered for the title-role by Walt Disney in his aborted live-action Alice In Wonderland. She later went to work for MGM and later at Columbia, and ended up re-christened Lisa Davis by John Ford while working on the latter's production of The Long Gray Line (1955). The 19-year-old Davis was, by this time, also starting to attract attention from the press over the men who were interested in her -- the latter included English actor Michael Rennie and American leading man Richard Long. In 1957, she was signed to play a major co-starring role in Queen Of Outer Space (originally "Queen of the Universe"), where she met her future husband, co-star Patrick Waltz. Davis managed to get noticed in the movie, despite competition for attention from Zsa Zsa Gabor and a brace of international beauty pageant winners. Amid more film and television work, and even some theatrical appearances, she and Waltz were married in 1958, and they later had two daughters and a son. Davis had another professional rendezvous with Walt Disney in 1959, when she was approached about portraying one of the characters in the animated feature 101 Dalmations -- Davis voiced the part of Anita, and the movie went on to become her best-known screen work. She retired from acting in the 1960's, and she and Waltz were divorced in 1971, a year before his death from a heart attack.