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: Lead actress, onscreen from the '80s.

Trivia: Jerry Orbach often commented, without false modesty, that he was fortunate indeed to have been a steadily working actor since the age of 20. Such was an understatement: graced with not only formidable dramatic instinct but one of American theater's top singing voices, Orbach resisted others' attempts to peg him as a character actor time and again and established himself as one of the most unique talents in entertainment per se. Television producer Dick Wolf perhaps put it best when he described Orbach as "a legendary figure of 20th century show business" and "one of the most honored performers of his generation."A native of the Bronx, Orbach was born to an ex-vaudevillian father who worked full time as a restaurant manager and a mother who sang professionally on the radio. The Orbachs moved around constantly during Jerry's youth, relocating from Gotham to Scranton to Wilkes-Barre to Springfield, Massachusetts and eventually settling in Chicago - a mobility that gave the young Orbach an unusual ability to adapt to any circumstance or situation, and thus presaged his involvement in drama. Orbach later attended Northwestern University, trained with Herbert Berghof and Lee Strasberg, and took his Gotham theatrical bow in 1955, as an understudy in the popular 1955 revival of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill's The Threepenny Opera, eventually playing the lead role of serial killer Macheath. During the Threepenny run, Orbach made his first film appearance in the Manhattan-filmed low budgeter Cop Killer (1958). In 1960, Orbach created the role of flamboyant interlocutor El Gallo in the off-Broadway smash The Fantasticks, and later starred in such Broadway productions as Carnival (1961), Promises Promises (1966), Chicago (1975) and 42nd Street (1983). By day, Orbach made early-1960s appearances in several New York-based TV series, notably The Shari Lewis Show. In the early years, Orbach's film assignments were infrequent, but starting around 1981, with his pivotal role as officer Gus Levy in Sidney Lumet's masterful urban epic Prince of the City, the actor generally turned up in around one movie per year. His more fondly remembered screen assignments include the part of Jennifer Grey's father in Dirty Dancing (1987), Martin Landau's shady underworld brother in Woody Allen's Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989) the voice of the Chevalieresque candellabra in the Disney cartoon feature Beauty and the Beast (1990), and Billy Crystal's easily amused agent in Mr. Saturday Night (1992). Orbach perhaps made his most memorable contribution to television, however. After headlining a brief, short-lived detective series entitled The Law and Harry McGraw from September 1987 to February 1988 (a spinoff of Murder, She Wrote), Orbach landed a role that seemed to draw heavily from his Prince of the City portrayal: Detective Lennie Briscoe, a sardonic, mordant police investigator on Wolf's blockbuster cop drama Law & Order.Orbach carried the assignment for twelve seasons, and many attributed a large degree of the program's success to him.Jerry Orbach died of prostate cancer at the age of 69 on December 28, 2004. Three years later, Orbach turned up, posthumously, on subway print advertisements for the New York Eye Bank. As a performer with nearly perfect vision, he had opted to donate his eyes to two women after his death - a reflection on the remarkable humanitarian ideals that characterized his off-camera self.

Trivia: Susan Sullivan is an Emmy-nominated actress who has proved equally adept at drama or comedy. She is best known for her eight years portraying Maggie Gioberti on the television series Falcon Crest, a prime-time network soap opera in a vein similar to that of Dallas and Dynasty, but she has also shown her comedic skills on sitcoms such as It's a Living and The George Carlin Show. Born Susan Michaela Sullivan in New York City in 1942 (some sources say 1944), she put herself through college by working as a Playboy bunny in the early '60s. Indeed, Sullivan was among the first Playboy bunnies employed by the newly opened Playboy Club in New York; as she has recalled in interviews, this was a most intellectually impressive and ambitious array of women, somewhat different from what the Playboy bunnies subsequently became, many of them aspiring to careers in law and other professions, and financing their educations by working at the club. Her television career began when she joined the cast of the daytime drama Another World in the role of Lenore Curtin, who she portrayed for four seasons. Sullivan based her career in New York, and was appearing in an off-Broadway play when she was spotted by an agent who offered to represent her if she moved to Hollywood. She accepted and thus began her career in prime-time television. Sullivan (who was sometimes billed as Susan J. Sullivan early in her career to distinguish her from another late-'60s actress named Susan Sullivan) appeared on television series such as Medical Center, McMillan & Wife, Kojak, and Petrocelli during the early '70s before landing the role that would establish her acting credentials, as Peter Strauss' lover in Rich Man, Poor Man--Book II (1976), which earned her an Emmy nomination. That same year, she moved into feature films, playing opposite Charlton Heston in Jack Smight's feature film Midway; she only had ten minutes of screen time in the movie, but hers were some of the best and most dramatically involving scenes in a movie that was otherwise largely devoid of character development or depth. Her sequences were used exclusively for the two-part television version of the movie, which means that theatrical audiences never saw her; Sullivan's scenes were missing from every home video version of the film until the October 2001 DVD reissue of Midway, which contained her footage. She spent most of the rest of the '70s in good guest-starring roles on series such as Taxi (where, in the episode "What Price Bobby," she proved herself capable of getting laughs and being sexually provocative at the same time, portraying an amorously predatory theatrical agent), and she turned in an exceptional dramatic performance in the pilot film for The Incredible Hulk, portraying a research scientist and friend of stricken hero David Banner (Bill Bixby). Her star continued to rise when she was cast in the lead role, as a gynecologist, in the made-for-television feature Having Babies and a sequel, which led to Sullivan playing the lead role in the subsequent ABC network series of the same name. From there, she was cast in the sitcom It's a Living, playing the most mature and sensible member of a group of waitresses at an upscale restaurant. It was after leaving It's a Living in 1981 that Sullivan earned the lead role of Maggie Gioberti on the drama Falcon Crest, which she played for eight seasons. Since leaving that series in 1989, a year before the end of its run, Sullivan has continued to act in both comedy and drama, and appeared on television on behalf of various charitable causes, as well as serving as the commercial spokesperson for Tylenol. She was a co-star on the George Carlin Show and has appeared on sitcoms such as Dharma & Greg. In the 2st century she found a regular gig voicing Hippolyta on the animated Justice League series, and enjoyed recurring roles on both The Drew Carey Show and Castle.

Trivia: Actor Philip Michael Thomas was fond of referring to his family background as "American Gumbo;" his ethnic makeup was a mixture of black, German, Irish, and three different Indian Tribes. A former theology student at Alabama's Oakwood college, Thomas launched his acting career when he won an audition for the Broadway musical Hair. Of his handful of movie appearances in the 1970s, Thomas is best remembered for his portrayal of Stix in the cult-favorite Sparkle (1976). From 1984 through 1989, Thomas was seen on a weekly basis as Detective Ricardo Tubbs on the MTV-influenced TV cop series Miami Vice. During this period, he continued his pre-stardom activities of writing music, poetry, and philosophical essays (in 1983, he'd published a book of aphorisms, Perfect Moment of Truth Sayings); he also managed his own recording label, turning out a well-received album to cash in on his Miami Vice success. Philip Michael Thomas' most recent projects have included a series of made-for-cable adventure specials, released under the blanket title Extralarge.

Trivia: Mother was an animator for Disney Studios. Played Laura in The Glass Menagerie while at University of Maryland. Was cast on soap Ryan's Hope while still in college. Met her husband, Thomas Ian Griffith, when he was cast as her on-screen love interest on Another World.

Trivia: On stage from 1957, American actor Andy Romano made his film bow two years later. Romano's earlier assignments included the part of J.D., a member of Eric Von Zipper's "Rat Pack," in several of American-International's Beach Party movies. He later played lawmen and crooks, both comic and otherwise. On TV, Andy Romano played Detective Joe Caruso in Get Christie Love! (1975) and Frank Richards in Friends (the 1979 "teen angst" sitcom, not the current NBC hit).

Trivia: Made his acting debut in 1976 in the soap opera Search for Tomorrow. Best known for his role as Jeff Colby in both the prime-time ABC soap opera Dynasty and the spin-off series The Colbys. Was a judge at the 1982 Miss USA pageant. Owns a 230-acre farm in Cambridge, NY.

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: Betsy Jones-Moreland is best remembered today as a statuesque actress and leading lady of the late 1950s and early 1960s, especially in the films of Roger Corman. Yet she was always a somewhat reluctant actress, even as she pursued a career in the field. Born Mary Elizabeth Jones in Brooklyn, New York, in 1930, she seems never to have considered a career in entertainment, or any particularly "public" profession, while growing up. She was an office worker and secretary, her sole contact with the entertainment business being the fact that the company she worked for owned the rights to several children's shows of the 1950s. She began taking acting lessons as a way of overcoming her basic shyness, and that led her to getting work as a showgirl, which resulted in her earning a role in a touring company production of The Solid Gold Cadillac. She ended up in Hollywood, starting with bit roles in major releases, such as The Brothers Rico and The Garment Jungle. She soon became part of Roger Corman's stock company, starting with The Saga of the Viking Women And Their Voyage to the Waters of the Great Sea Serpent (1957) and culminating with the title role in The Last Woman on Earth (1960) and the female lead in Creature From the Haunted Sea (1961). In between these quickie productions and some small-screen work, Jones-Moreland also appeared in one notable Western: André de Toth's Day of the Outlaw (1959). Her television appearances included episodes of Perry Mason, McHale's Navy, Have Gun, Will Travel, My Favorite Martian, and Ironside. Her most memorable television appearance was in the Outer Limits episode "The Mutant", in which she appeared as part of a space expedition that's endangered when one of their number encounters deadly radiation. Corman later used her in his first big-budget movie, The St. Valentine's Day Massacre (1967), and she followed this up with small roles in theatrical films such as The Hindenburg and Gable and Lombard. She closed out her career as a trial judge in a handful of episodes of the 1990s revival of Perry Mason.

Trivia: A frequent presence in both film and television from the 1970s onward, African-American character player Earl Billings moved from landing one- and two-shot bit roles in prime-time series programs and low-profile movies to signing for supporting roles in some of Hollywood's most acclaimed comedies and dramas. This stocky, heavyset player demonstrated a knack for playing black everymen -- often essaying the parts of police officers, detectives, and security guards. Billings first began receiving onscreen credit around 1976, with a single-episode contribution to Norman Lear's sitcom Good Times. Soon after that, the actor appeared in the recurring role of Rob on What's Happening!! Following a turn in the little-seen Sounder, Part Two (1976) and credit as a parole office worker in the gentle yet profane Richard Pryor comedy Bustin' Loose (1981), Billings acted in several telemovies. After a cinematic lapse of several years, Billings rebounded with an appearance in the blockbuster 1987 John Badham crime comedy Stakeout. A consistent string of supporting turns in A-list productions followed, including (but not limited to) Jimmy Hollywood (1994), Crimson Tide (1995), American Splendor (2003), Thank You for Smoking (2005), and Something New (2006). Billings augmented this success with occasional work on such prime-time series as Ally McBeal and ER. In 2008, he took on his first regular TV role, playing Principal Huffy on the sitcom Miss Guided, starring Judy Greer as an earnest high-school guidance councilor, but the series was unfortunately very short-lived.

Trivia: African American actor James McEachin was a stage actor until signed to a Universal contract in the mid-1960s. Though relatively young, McEachin projected a middle-aged, "solid citizen" image that perfectly suited his title character in the Universal television series Tenafly (1973). McEachin was cast as private eye and loyal family man Harry Tenafly, one of the few TV detectives who relied more on brains than movie-star charisma. Since that time, James McEachin has usually been cast as a cop; he played Sergeant (and later Lieutenant) Brock on virtually every Perry Mason TV movie of the 1980s and 1990s-a notable exception being the 1987 entry The Case of the Scandalous Scoundrel, in which he was cast as "Harry Forbes."