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: Worked as a taxi driver in Boston and as a lifeguard on Cape Cod during a two-year hiatus between high school and college. Before moving to Los Angeles in the mid-1980s, performed with the New York Shakespeare Festival, with Joseph Papp's Public Theatre and in a Steppenwolf Theatre off-Broadway production of Sam Shepard's True West. Used CPR to save a heart-attack victim's life in a restaurant in 1997. Has run in marathons and competed in triathlons. Actress Abby Dalton (Falcon Crest) is his mother-in-law.

Trivia: Ken Kercheval couldn't always count on his acting income to keep groceries in his icebox during his early years in show business. During slack times, Kercheval took a wide variety of part-time jobs: encyclopedia salesman, airline reservation clerk, sewer-line dynamiter, even cemetery plot peddler. When times were good, Kercheval appeared on stage by night, and in such New York-based soap operas as Search for Tomorrow, The Secret Storm and How to Survive a Marriage. He was also a journeyman film actor, essaying supporting roles in such productions as Pretty Poison (1968), The Seven Ups (1971) and Network (1976). Beginning in 1978, Kercheval played lawyer Cliff Barnes, the long-suffering brother-in-law of Bobby Ewing (Patrick Duffy) on TV's Dallas. Evidently Barnes' retainer was generous enough for him to ignore the endless humiliations doled out by the shifty J. R. Ewing (Larry Hagman), inasmuch as Kercheval and Hagman were the only Dallas regulars to appear continuously until the series' cancellation. During Dallas' run, Ken Kercheval occasionally moonlighted in made-for-TV films, notably in the role of Buffalo Bill in 1984's Calamity Jane.

Trivia: To hear him tell it, Robert Vaughn has spent most of his acting career getting very well paid for being artistically frustrated. Born in Manhattan and raised in Minnesota, Vaughn went straight from college drama classes to his first film, the juvenile delinquent opus No Time to Be Young (1957). Ever on the search for "meaningful" roles, Vaughn signed to play a survivor of a nuclear apocalypse in what he assumed would be a serious, politically potent drama: the film was released as Teenage Caveman (1957). Though Oscar-nominated for his performance as a crippled, alcoholic war veteran in The Young Philadelphians (1959), Vaughn didn't rise to full stardom until 1964, where he was signed to play ultra-cool secret agent Napoleon Solo in the TV espionage series The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (1964-1968). He swore at that time that he'd never, ever subject himself to the rigors of another television series, but in 1972 he was back to the weekly grind in the British series The Protectors. In films, Vaughn has been most effective as an icy, corporate heavy, notably in Bullitt (1968) and Superman III (1982). On-stage, Vaughn has exhibited a special fondness for Shakespeare (Hamlet in particular); he was given an excellent opportunity to recite the Bard's prose on film when he played Casca in Julius Caesar (1970). A dyed-in-the-wool liberal activist, Vaughn worked on his Masters and Ph.D. in political science at L.A. City College during his U.N.C.L.E. years; his doctoral thesis was later expanded into the 1972 history of the HUAC, Only Victims. Vaughn later had several recurring roles on TV shows like The Nanny and Law & Order and the British series Hustle and Coronation Street. He died in 2016, just shy of his 84th birthday.

Trivia: Tall, straight-laced American actor Robert Culp parlayed his appearance and demeanor into a series of clean-cut character roles, often (though not always) with a humorous, mildly sarcastic edge. He was perhaps best known for three accomplishments: his turn as a Southern California documentary filmmaker who decides, along with his wife (Natalie Wood) to suddenly go counterculture with an "open marriage" in Paul Mazursky's Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice (1969); his iconic three-season role as an undercover agent in the espionage-themed series I Spy (1965-8); and his three-season run as Bill Maxwell on Stephen Cannell's superhero spoof series The Greatest American Hero (1981-3). Born in Oakland, California in 1930, Culp attended several West Coast colleges while training for a dramatic career. At 21, he made his Broadway debut in He Who Gets Slapped. Within six years, he was starring in his own Friday night CBS Western, Trackdown (1957-9) as Hoby Gilman, an 1870s era Texas Ranger. During the two-year run of this program, Culp began writing scripts, a habit he'd carry over to other series, notably The Rifleman and Gunsmoke. These all represented fine and noble accomplishments for a young actor, but as indicated, I Spy delivered a far greater impact to the young actor's career: it made Culp (along with his co-star, Bill Cosby) a bona fide celebrity. The men co-starred in the NBC adventure yarn as, respectively, Kelly Robinson and Alexander Scott, undercover agents involved in globetrotting missions for the U.S. government. Both actors brought to the program a sharp yet subtle sense of humor that (coupled with its exotic locations) made it one of the major discoveries of the 1965-6 prime-time line-up. During the second of I Spy's three seasons, Culp made his directorial debut by helming episodes of Spy; he went on to direct installments of several other TV programs. The success of Bob & Carol at the tail end of the 1960s proved that Culp could hold his own as a movie star, and he later directed and co-starred in 1972 theatrical feature Hickey and Boggs, which reunited him with Cosby, albeit to much lesser acclaim. Unfortunately, as the years rolled on, Culp proved susceptible to the lure of parts in B-pictures, such as Sky Riders (1976), Flood! (1976) and Hot Rod (1979), though he delivered a fine portrayal in television's critically-acclaimed Roots: The Next Generations (1979). Culp rebounded further with the semicomic role of CIA chief Maxwell on American Hero, but many now-infamous behind-the-scenes issues (and external issues, such as the shooting of Ronald Reagan) beleaguered that program and ended its run after only three seasons. In the years that followed, Culp vacillated between exploitation roles, in tripe such as Big Bad Mama 2 and Silent Night, Deadly Night 3, and more respectable, mainstream guest turns in television series including The Cosby Show and Murder, She Wrote. He enjoyed one of his most prestigious assignments with a supporting role in the big screen John Grisham-Alan Pakula thriller The Parallax View (1993), opposite Denzel Washington and Julia Roberts. In the years that followed, Culp's on-camera presence grew less and less frequent, though he did make a cameo in the 1996 Leslie Nielsen laugher Spy Hard. Television continued to provide some of Culp's finest work: he rejoined old friend Cosby for a 1994 I Spy TV-movie reunion and made guest appearances in such series as Lonesome Dove, Law & Order and The Dead Zone. Following a period of semi-retirement, Culp died suddenly and rather arbitrarily, when he sustained a head injury during a fall outside of his Hollywood home in March 2010. He was 79 years old.

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: American leading man Don Galloway started his television career in the 1950s in the New York-based soap opera The Secret Storm. In 1963, Galloway was among the first regular cast members of ABC's General Hospital, playing Buzz Stryker. His first regular nighttime video stint was on Tom Dick and Harry, one-third of the 90-minute weekly sitcom 90 Bristol Court (1964). From 1967 through 1975, Galloway was seen as officer Ed Brown on the Raymond Burr prime-time vehicle Ironside, reprising the character for a made-for-TV "reunion" film in the late 1980s. He later appeared with Burr in a brace of Perry Mason TV movies, playing a different character in each. Don Galloway's movie credits include the role of Richard in The Big Chill (1983).

Trivia: A memorable voice and a major talent, Chicago-born Harry J. Lennix first caught audiences' attention with the role of Dr. Greg Fischer on the medical drama ER. He would go on to make waves in films like Collateral Damage, The Matrix sequels, and Ray. as the 2000's and 2010's unfolded, Lennix would add more prominent TV roles to his resume, memorably starring on 24, Commander in Chief, and Dollhouse.

Trivia: From the outset of his career, towering, grim-visaged actor Jack O'Halloran excelled in brutish roles. O'Halloran was impressively menacing as the nonverbal space criminal Non in the first two Superman movies. He was equally adept with dialogue as the hulking Moose Malloy in 1978's Farewell My Lovely. Jack O'Halloran continued to grunt and glower his way through the 1990s, essaying such fearsome roles as Yeti in The Flintstones (1993).

Trivia: Lucinda Dickey is a lead actress and dancer who first appeared onscreen in the 1980s.