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: Baby-faced second lead Don Dubbins began his film career at Columbia, playing young military types in From Here to Eternity (1953) and The Caine Mutiny (1954). Film star James Cagney took a liking to Dubbins, and saw to it that the young performer was prominently cast in Cagney's These Wilder Years (1956) and Tribute to a Bad Man (1956). Maturing into a dependable character actor, Dubbins later appeared in such films as The Prize (1963), The Illustrated Man (1969) and Death Wish II (1976). After nearly a decade in retirement, Don Dubbins died at the age of 63.

Trivia: Born in Europe, Steve Ihnat spent most of his childhood and adolescence in Canada. Turning to acting, Ihnat began making the casting-call rounds in the 1950s and 1960s. He played secondary roles in theatrical features like In Like Flint (1967) and Madigan (1968), and chalked up a number of bad-guy portrayals on television. In the late 1960s, he segued into writing and directing on several episodic TV programs. He scripted and directed one theatrical feature, The Honkers (1972), before he was felled by a heart attack while attending the Cannes Film Festival. Steve Ihnat was married to actress Sally Carter, who after her husband's death loyally billed herself as Sally Carter Ihnat.

Trivia: Supporting actor Martin West (born Martin Weixelbaum) has been appearing in feature films and on television since making his debut in Freckles (1960). In 1966, he became the fourth actor to play Dr. Brewer on the daytime soap opera General Hospital.

Trivia: Silver-tongued actor Douglas Dumbrille played just about every type in his long screen career, but it was as a dignified villain that he is best remembered. Born in Canada, Dumbrille did most of his stage work in the United States, breaking into films with His Woman in 1931. He bounced between supporting parts and unbilled bits in the early 1930s, usually at Warner Bros., where his sleek brand of skullduggery fit right in with the gangsters, shysters and political phonies popping up in most of the studio's 1930s product. Superb in modern dress roles, Dumbrille also excelled at costume villainy: it is claimed that, in Lives of the Bengal Lancers (1935), he was the first bad guy to growl, "We have ways of making you talk." The actor's pompous demeanor made him an ideal foil for such comedians as the Marx Brothers, with whom he appeared twice, and Abbott and Costello, who matched wits with Dumbrille in four different films. Sometimes, Dumbrille's reputation as a no-good was used to lead the audience astray; he was frequently cast as red-herring suspects in such murder mysteries as Castle in the Desert (1942), while in the Johnny Mack Brown western Flame of the West (1945), Dumbrille piqued the viewer's interest by playing a thoroughly honest, decent sheriff (surely he'd turn bad by the end, thought the audience -- but he didn't). In real life a gentle man whose diabolical features were softened by a pair of spectacles, Dumbrille mellowed his image as he grew older, often playing bemused officials and judges who couldn't make head nor tails of Gracie Allen's thought patterns on TV's The Burns and Allen Show. Late in life, a widowed Douglas Dumbrille married Patricia Mobray, daughter of his close friend -- and fellow screen villain -- Alan Mowbray.

Trivia: American actress Irene Anders, born Irene Henniger, appeared on stage, television, radio and occasionally in films.