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: The son of legendary Broadway actor DeWolfe Hopper and movie actress Hedda Hopper, William Hopper made his film debut as an infant in one of his father's films. The popular consensus is that the younger Hopper was given his first talking-picture break because of his mother's reputation as the most feared of the Hollywood gossips. Not so: Hopper was signed to his first Warner Bros. contract in 1937, a year or so before Hedda had established herself as the queen of the dirt-dishers. At first billing himself as DeWolfe Hopper Jr., Hopper languished in bit parts and walk-ons for several years. He wasn't able to graduate to better roles until the 1950s, by which time he was calling himself William Hopper. After a largely undistinguished film career (notable exceptions to his usual humdrum assignments were his roles in 20 Million Miles to Earth [1957] and The Bad Seed [1956]) Hopper finally gained fame -- and on his own merits -- as private detective Paul Drake on the enormously popular Perry Mason television series, which began its eight-season run in 1957. In a bizarre coincidence, Perry Mason left the air in 1966, the same year that William Hopper's mother Hedda passed away.

Trivia: Once known as "America's oldest living teenager," emcee, occasional actor, television producer, commercial pitchman, restaurateur, and entrepreneur Dick Clark was one of Hollywood's powerhouses, but became most famous for hosting the longest-running series on the ABC television network, American Bandstand, which aired from 1957 to 1987 and then was resurrected for a year on the USA network in 1989. This show played a vital role in promoting rock music and gave many important acts their first national exposure. Clark began his career as a radio announcer. The first episodes of American Bandstand were broadcast from Philadelphia and were quite innovative. Each show featured popular artists who lip-synched their latest hits, interviews, autograph sessions, and lots of teen dancing. Though playing rock & roll music -- which was still regarded with trepidation and suspicion among conservatives -- the shows were reassuringly wholesome, an image in large part projected by the clean-cut, friendly, and honest-faced Clark himself. Through the years, the canny host secured the rights to each episode, many of which contain the only available clips of popular performers and one-hit wonders alike. Therefore, his collection provided a priceless archive to the history of rock music. Clark at one time was an aspiring actor and has appeared in a few feature films playing someone other than himself. He made his feature-film debut in 1960's Because They're Young. As an emcee, he hosted game shows and the ABC New Year's Eve telecast from Times Square in New York for many years. He also hosted numerous television compilation shows, often in the company of Ed McMahon with whom he represented the Publisher's Clearing House sweepstakes on television. As a producer, Clark's Dick Clark Productions was responsible for numerous series, television movies, game shows, specials, and compilations as well as television commercials and awards specials. As a restaurant owner, Clark founded a small chain of Dick Clark's American Bandstand Grills, rock & roll-themed restaurants decorated with memorabilia from Clark's enormous personal collection.In 2004, Clark suffered a stroke that nearly ended his broadcasting career. Though he managed to sporadically come back for his annual New Years Eve specials, Clark eventually passed away at the age of 82 from a heart attack in 2012, leaving behind a legacy unlike any other.

Trivia: James Stacy had passed the quarter-century mark before deciding upon an acting career. In 1956, Stacy's James Dean-ish handsomeness landed him a part in a Pepsi-Cola commercial. Afterward, Stacy put together a portfolio and started making the casting rounds. Unfortunately, his difficult attitude managed to get him fired from his first film role in South Pacific (1958), and had his lines taken away from him in Sayonara (1957). His recurring appearances as Fred on TV's The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet started the ball rolling again, and by 1965 Stacy was Columbia Pictures' answer to Frankie Avalon, starring in such Beach Party rip-offs as A Swingin' Summer and Winter a Go Go. He also found time to marry actress Connie Stevens, only to lose her to singer Eddie Fisher. Stacy's second wife was Kim Darby. From 1968 through 1971, Stacy starred on the TV western Lancer. Two years after the series' cancellation, he was seriously injured in a motorcycle accident, which cost him his left arm and leg. Courageously refusing to retire, he began appearing in roles specially written to accommodate his handicap. His comeback film was the 1975 Kirk Douglas western Posse, in which he was cast in the nonambulatory role of newspaper editor Hellman. In 1977, he starred in the TV-movie Just a Little Inconvenience, playing a double-amputee Vietnam veteran. And in Disney's 1982 fantasy film Something Wicked This Way Comes, Stacy plays a crippled, embittered bartender, who makes the mistake of his life when he wishes to be "whole" again. His last regular TV role was Rogosheske in the weekly cop series Wiseguy. In 1996, once he was retired from acting, he served a six-year prison sentence after pleading no contest to the molestation of a minor (Stacy's erratic behavior around his arrest negated the hope of only getting probation for the incident). He was released in 2001 and resumed his life as a private citizen. Stacy died in 2016.

Trivia: Only in the earliest stages of her career was actress Marilyn Mason billed as Marilyn. A professional from age 13, when she signed on with Los Angeles' Players Ring troupe, Mason made her first TV appearance on a 1955 Matinee Theater installment. She was particularly busy in the mid-to-late 1960s, playing the recurring role of Sally Welden on TV's Ben Casey and guesting on a variety of programs. In 1967, she was co-starred as Carrie Pipperidge in a televersion of Rodgers and Hammerstein's Carousel; and in 1969, she made her big-screen debut opposite Elvis Presley in The Trouble With Girls. Her last regular-series stint was as Nikki Bell in the 1971 James Franciscus starrer Longstreet. After a long absence, Marilyn Mason returned to television in the early 1990s in a brace of made-for-TV movies.

Trivia: Even in her nineties, British actress Estelle Winwood retained the wide-eyed naïveté of her ingénue days. An actress from the age of five, Winwood was trained at the Liverpool Repertory company. As an adult, she specialized in the plays of such leading theatrical lights of the early 20th century as Shaw and Galworthy. In 1918, she starred in Broadway's very first Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Why Marry?, and a few years later scored a personal triumph in The Circle. In films from 1933, Winwood was often cast as eccentric, birdlike old ladies, some few of which were capable of homicide. She is fondly remembered for such characterizations as Leslie Caron's fairy godmother in The Glass Slipper (1953) and the pass-the-hat lady in The Misfits (1961). Closing out her film career with the 1976 detective spoof Murder By Death, Estelle Winwood continued appearing on television until she passed the century mark; she died in her sleep at the age of 101.

Trivia: Had he been born a decade earlier, American actor Denver Pyle might well have joined the ranks of western-movie comedy sidekicks. Instead, Pyle, a Colorado farm boy, opted for studying law, working his way through school by playing drums in a dance band. Suddenly one day, Pyle became disenchanted with law and returned to his family farm, with nary an idea what he wanted to do with his life. Working in the oil fields of Oklahoma, he moved on to the shrimp boats of Galveston, Texas. A short stint as a page at NBC radio studios in 1940 didn't immediately lead to a showbiz career, as it has for so many others; instead, Pyle was inspired to perform by a mute oilfield coworker who was able to convey his thought with body language. Studying under such masters as Michael Chekhov and Maria Ouspenskaya, Pyle was able to achieve small movie and TV roles. He worked frequently on the western series of Roy Rogers and Gene Autry; not yet bearded and grizzled, Pyle was often seen as deputies, farmers and cattle rustlers. When his hair turned prematurely grey in his early '30s, Pyle graduated to banker, sheriff and judge roles in theatrical westerns -- though never of the comic variety. He also was a regular on two TV series, Code 3 (1956) and Tammy (1966). But his real breakthrough role didn't happen until 1967, when Pyle was cast as the taciturn sheriff in Bonnie and Clyde who is kidnapped and humilated by the robbers -- and then shows up at the end of the film to supervise the bloody machine-gun deaths of B&C. This virtually nonspeaking role won worldwide fame for Pyle, as well as verbal and physical assalts from the LA hippie community who regarded Bonnie and Clyde as folk heroes! From this point forward, Denver Pyle's billing, roles and salary were vastly improved -- and his screen image was softened and humanized by a full, bushy beard. Returning to TV, Pyle played the star's father on The Doris Day Show (1968-73); was Mad Jack, the costar/narrator of Life and Times of Grizzly Adams (1978-80); and best of all, spent six years (1979-85) as Uncle Jesse Duke on The Dukes of Hazzard. Looking stockier but otherwise unchanged, Denver Pyle was briefly seen in the 1994 hit Maverick, playing an elegantly dishonest cardshark who jauntily doffs his hat as he's dumped off of a riverboat. Pyle died of lung cancer at Burbank's Providence St. Joseph Medical Center at age 77.

Trivia: While attending the medical school of Columbia University, Gerald Mohr was offered an opportunity to audition as a radio announcer. The upshot of this was a job at CBS as the network's youngest reporter. He moved to the Broadway stage upon landing a role in The Petrified Forest. Shortly afterward, he became a member of Orson Welles' Mercury Theatre. He was chosen on the basis of his voice alone for his first film role as a heavily disguised phony mystic in Charlie Chan at Treasure Island (1939). Following wartime service, the dark, roguish Mohr was selected to play thief-turned-sleuth the Lone Wolf in Columbia's B-picture series of the same name. His detective activities spilled over into radio, where Mohr starred as Philip Marlowe, and TV, where in 1954 he was cast as Bogart-like café owner Chris Storm on the final season of the syndicated Foreign Intrigue. Gerald Mohr died at the age of 54, shortly after playing a crooked gambler in Funny Girl (1968).

Trivia: American actor Jackie Coogan belonged to a family of vaudevillians. At age four Coogan was already a stage attraction performing with his father when he caught the eye of Charles Chaplin, who immediately hired him (and his father as well). After giving him a bit part in the short A Day's Pleasure (1919), he made Coogan his co-star in the masterpiece The Kid (1921). This launched Coogan's film career and he went on to become one of the highest paid film actors of the day. Movie audiences worldwide doted on him, but his career as a child star petered out when he was 13 and too old to be "cute." In 1935 when his mother and stepfather refused to let him have the $4 million that he had amassed during his child acting days, he filed suit against them. When the settlement finally came, he received a mere $126,000., but the legal fight brought attention to such abuses, and resulted in the "California Child Actor's Bill" also known as the "Coogan Act" which protected the earnings of child actors. He was married to Betty Grable for 3 years, and to three other showgirls in succession afterwards. During his adulthood, he occasionally appeared in films playing character roles and worked frequently in television, most notably as Uncle Fester in The Addams Family TV series. He died on March 1, 1984.

Trivia: The son of veteran vaudeville headliner Julius Tannen and the brother of actor Charles Tannen, William Tannen entered films as a Columbia contractee in 1934. Along with several other young stage-trained performers, Tannen was "discovered" by MGM in 1938's Dramatic School. During his subsequent years at MGM, he was briefly associated with three top comedy teams: He played Virginia Grey's brother in the Marx Brothers' The Big Store (1941), a Nazi flunkey in Laurel and Hardy's Air Raid Wardens (1943), and a "hard-boiled" assistant director in Abbott and Costello in Hollywood (1945). On TV, William Tannen was seen in the recurring role of Deputy Hal on the weekly Western Wyatt Earp (1955-1961).

Trivia: Also billed as Saul Gorse and Sol Gorss, this busy character actor/stunt man entered films in 1933. Gorss spent the better part of his career at Warner Bros., playing muscular utility roles and doubling for the studio's male stars. He forsook Hollywood for war service in 1943, then returned to films, once more cast in minor roles in westerns and crime pictures. One of Saul Gorss' most distinguished credits of the 1950s was The Thing, in which he was one of the stunt performers and coordinators.

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.