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 Congregationalist minister, Wendell Corey was pursuing a brief career as a washing machine salesman when he showed up at the rehearsals for a community play to pick up a friend. Invited by the director to read for a part, Corey found he liked performing, and eventually turned pro in summer stock. After a string of Broadway flops, Corey finally scored a success in the original 1945 production of Elmer Rice's Dream Girl. Entering films with a Paramount contract in 1946, the incisive, sharp-eyed Corey spent the next fifteen years alternating between leads (File on Thelma Jordon), "best friend" supporting characters (Rear Window), and, most effectively, villains (The Big Knife). On TV Corey starred in the weekly series Harbor Command (1957) and The Eleventh Hour (1961-63). Intensely interested in politics, Corey was once the president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and the director of the Screen Actors, and served on the Santa Monica City Council; he ran for but did not win California's Republican congressional seat.

Trivia: Character actor of films and television, Paul Brinegar specialized in playing feisty, grizzled cowboy sidekicks. Fans of the Western series Rawhide may remember Brinegar for playing Wishbone, the grumbly old cook. He was also known for playing Lamar Pettybone on the early-'80s television series Matt Houston. Born and raised in New Mexico, he headed to California as a young man and made his feature film debut in Larceny (1948). From there, he launched a steady film career that slowed down considerably in the late '50s, after he began appearing on television but did not end until 1994, when Brinegar made his final screen appearance, as a stagecoach driver, in the 1994 film version of Maverick.

Trivia: James Best started appearing on film in 1950 in such westerns as Winchester 73 and Kansas Raiders, he was touted as a bright new face on the cinematic scene. When Best showed up as a regular on the 1963 TV series Temple Houston, he was promoted as a "promising" performer. When co-starred in Jerry Lewis' Three on a Couch in 1965, Best was given an "and introducing" credit. And in 1979, He finally found his niche when he was cast as Sheriff Roscoe Coltrane on the immensely popular weekly TVer The Dukes of Hazzard. Best played the role for all seven seasons of the show, and returned to it for TV movies and video games. He died in 2015, at age 88.

Trivia: American actress Marilyn Erskine portrayed co-leads in a few Hollywood features from the early 1950s, but her best-known role was that of Ida Cantor in The Eddie Cantor Story (1953). Erskine started her performing career on a radio show in Buffalo, New York when she was only three. As an adolescent she appeared in Broadway musicals and plays.

Trivia: The daughter of a California dry-cleaning establishment owner, Gloria Talbott was dancing and singing almost from the time she could walk and talk. As a child and adolescent, she played unbilled bits in such films as Maytime (1937) and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1945). During her teen years, she won a high school acting trophy, and was voted "Miss Glendale" in 1947. Her first big professional break was in a Los Angeles stage production of One Fine Day, which starred the screen team of Charles Ruggles and Mary Boland. Restarting her film career in 1953, Talbott's first screen role of consequence was as the daughter of Leo G. Carroll and Joan Bennett in the delightful "comedy of murders" We're No Angels (1955). She truly came into her own as the nervous but self-reliant heroine of such B horror gems as The Cyclops (1957), The Daughter of Dr. Jekyll (1957), I Married a Monster from Outer Space (1957) and The Leech Woman (1960). On a less fearsome note, she was seen in the recurring role of Abbie Crandall on the 1950s TV western Wyatt Earp. Though it might appear to the casual viewer that Talbott accepted any role that came her way, the claustrophobic actress was known to turn down parts that required her to swim underwater or to be trapped in small, enclosed places. She retired from acting in 1966 to spend more time with her family, emerging publicly only to appear at various science-fiction and nostalgia conventions around the country. In 1985, Gloria was co-starred with several other horror-flick veterans in the tongue-in-cheek thriller Attack of the B-Movie Monsters.

Trivia: Born in London, Les Tremayne moved to America in his early teens. Educated at Northwestern, Columbia and UCLA, Tremayne went on the stage in the early 1930s, where his distinguished demeanor and mellifluous voice served him well. He rose to stardom on radio, appearing in literally thousands of "Golden Age" broadcasts, notably as star of the long-running anthology The First Nighter Program. In films from 1951, Tremayne brought a large dose of sober credibility to many an otherwise hard-to-swallow science fiction opus. At his best as General Mann in War of the Worlds (1953)--the General's explanation of the Martian's invasion strategy remains one of the finest pieces of pure exposition in all of "fantastic" cinema--Tremayne was also successful in maintaining his dignity in cheapies of the Angry Red Planet (1959) and Slime People (1965) variety. The actor's contributions to the sci-fi genre were hosannahed in the direct-to-video production The Attack of the B-Movie Monsters (1985). In addition, Tremayne showed up in several non-genre efforts, usually in small but substantial roles like the auctioneer in North by Northwest (Tremayne's single scene in this 1959 Hitchcock classic also featured his old First Nighter colleague Olan Soule). Busiest on television as a commercial spokesman and voiceover artist, Tremayne found time to appear on the prime-time TV version of radio's One Man's Family (1951); as Inspector Richard Queen on the 1958-59 incarnation of the venerable Ellery Queen; and as Mentor on the Saturday morning Captain Marvel-inspired weekly Shazam! (1974-77). In 1995, Les Tremayne, as golden-throated as ever, was inducted into the Radio Hall of Fame during a moving, nationally broadcast ceremony from Chicago's Museum of Broadcasting.

Trivia: With his unusual gaunt features and intense expression, William Lanteau made a career out of playing eccentrics and character roles. His role as town leader Chester Wanamaker on the Newhart show was the most visible part in a career of more than 30 years on stage, screen, and television. Lanteau's theatrical credits included productions of The Matchmaker, What Every Woman Knows, Mrs. McThing, The Remarkable Mr. Pennypacker, Detective Story, and Catch My Soul -- he was also in the original stage production of On Golden Pond, playing Charlie Martin, a part he re-created in the film version with Katharine Hepburn, Henry Fonda, and Jane Fonda. His film credits date from 1959 and his portrayal of Available Jones in the screen version of the musical Li'l Abner. He began working in television around the same time, and one of his most memorable and poignant early appearances was in the Andy Griffith Show episode "Stranger in Town," portraying a mysterious new arrival in Mayberry who seems to know all there is to know about everyone in the town, gradually eliciting suspicion and panic on the part of all concerned -- in the end, the explanation for his character's behavior is not only harmless but very touching, and Lanteau pulled it off perfectly, moving from quirkily mysterious to vulnerable in the course of less than 20 minutes of screen time without any seams showing. Lanteau also played small parts in The Honeymoon Machine and That Touch of Mink, and slightly larger roles in Sex and the Single Girl and Hotel, but it was mostly on television that Lanteau kept busy when he wasn't working on the stage. On television, his work included one-shot roles on Naked City, Dr. Kildare, The Man From U.N.C.L.E., Green Acres, The Mothers-In-Law, All in the Family, Here's Lucy, Perry Mason, Sanford and Son, Diff'rent Strokes, Coach, and Murder She Wrote during the 1960s, '70s, and '80s, before the role on Newhart opened up. He became part of one of the most successful "double acts" on television, working alongside rotund actor Thomas Hill, who portrayed Chester, the other political leader of the town. Lanteau passed away in 1993, three years after the cancellation of the series, from complications arising out of heart surgery.