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 scion of a wealthy Detroit family, William Talman would later claim that he learned to "champion the underdog" while a member of his Episcopal church boxing team. In his 20s, Talman became an evangelist for the Moral Re-Armament Movement, and later made at stab at studying law. He drifted to New York, where, through the intervention of an actor friend of his father, he began picking up small stage roles. After extensive experience in New York and in the touring company of Of Mice and Men, Talman moved to Hollywood, where in 1949 he played his first important screen role as a gangster in Red, Hot and Blue (1949). At his best when his characters were at their worst, Talman developed into one of Tinseltown's most fearsome screen villains, never more so than when he played a psycho killer who slept with one eye open in the noir classic The Hitchhiker (1955). In 1957, Talman was cast as Hamilton Burger, the perennially losing District Attorney on the popular TV weekly Perry Mason. He remained with the series until March of 1960, when he was arrested for throwing a wild party where vast quantities of illegal substances were consumed. The Perry Mason producers had every intention of firing Talman from the series, but he was reinstated thanks to the loyal intervention of his co-stars -- particularly Raymond Burr, who threatened to quit the show if Talman wasn't given a second chance. William Talman was last seen on TV in a series of anti-smoking public service announcements; these spots were run posthumously, at Talman's request, following his death from lung cancer at the age of 53.

Trivia: Diminutive Irish-American character actor Walter Burke kicked off his film career in 1948. Burke's weaselly, cigarette-dangling-from-lips characterization of political flunky Sugar Boy in the Oscar-winning All the King's Men (1949) set the tone for most of his later roles. Though often afforded meaty roles on television -- he was one of several actors who subbed for William Talman during the 1960-1961 season of Perry Mason -- Burke had no objection to accepting tiny but memorable bits, such as the cockney who warns Eliza Doolittle, "There's a bloke be'ind that pillar, takin' down every word that you're sayin'!" in the opening scene of My Fair Lady (1964). In another unbilled assignment, Burke convincingly voice-doubled for narrator Walter Winchell in a handful of early-'60s episodes of The Untouchables. Closing out his film career in the early '70s, Walter Burke moved to Pennsylvania, where he became an acting teacher.

Trivia: In films from 1942, model and cover girl Martha Vickers acted under her given name of MacVicar in her earliest screen assignments. She wasn't "Vickers" until her breakthrough film The Big Sleep (1946), in which she was cast as Carmen Sternwood, Lauren Bacalls debauched, thumb-sucking younger sister. The most famous of Vickers' three husbands was Mickey Rooney, to whom she was wed from 1949 to 1951; husband number two was publicist/producer A. C. Lyles Jr., while number three was polo player Manuel Rojas. Martha Vickers retired from films after appearing in Four Fast Guns (1960).

Trivia: American actor Tom Drake inaugurated his acting career in 1938 with Clean Beds, a Broadway-bound play that closed out of town. A revived Clean Beds in 1939 brought Drake to the attention of MGM, who only half-heartedly promoted the actor, usually casting him in bits or secondary roles. His chance at stardom in White Cliffs of Dover (1944) was squelched when Drake's scenes were cut from that still-overlong wartime drama. A better opportunity came in the role of Judy Garland's "boy next door" vis-a-vis in Meet Me in St. Louis (1944); this was followed by an even meatier part in The Green Years (1946), in which Drake managed to keep his head above water despite such formidable supporting acting talent as Hume Cronyn, Charles Coburn, Jessica Tandy and Gladys Cooper. Unfortunately, the good roles began diminishing shortly afterward; Drake's performance as Richard Rodgers in Words and Music (1948) was knocked out of the box by Mickey Rooney's tyro interpretation of Lorenz Hart, while in Mr. Belvedere Goes to College (1949) everybody in the cast - including Shirley Temple - played second fiddle to Clifton Webb. Never able to fulfill his potential, Drake continued into the '70s playing subordinate roles in 'A' pictures, the occasional lead in low-budget films, and secondary TV parts in such productions as Marcus Welby MD and The Return of Joe Forrester. A classic example of how talented people could fall between the tracks of the studio contract system, Tom Drake spent his final years supplementing his performing income with a job as a used car salesman.

Trivia: From the late '40s through the '50s Frankie Laine was an extremely popular singer. Though he subsequently appeared in several dramas, westerns and musicals during the '50s, his appeal never translated well to the screen. He was born Frank Paul Lo Veccho in Chicago, the son of a Sicilian barber. Though he tried for years to become famous, he had little success until he was discovered by Hoagy Carmichael in 1947. During his career, he earned over 16 gold records. Though he was not a particularly successful actor, Laine did sing title songs on a number of feature films. He also sang the famous title song for the television series Rawhide. In 1932, Laine was a champion marathon dancer who in five months set a record of dancing 3, 501 hours, an accomplishment that earned him a $500 prize.

Trivia: Actor Jon Lormer appeared in several films from the late '50s through the mid-'80s. He was also a teacher and director at the American Theater Wing in New York. Lormer guest starred in many television series and made-for-TV movies.