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: A self-described "household face," character actor Jesse White made his first stage appearance as a teenager in his adopted hometown of Akron, OH. Supporting himself with a variety of civilian jobs, White worked the nightclub circuit in Cleveland, then moved on to what was left of vaudeville in the late '30s. White's first Broadway role was in 1942's The Moon is Down; two years later he scored his biggest success as the acerbic sanitarium attendant in Mary Chase's Harvey, a role he would repeat for the 1950 film version (though Harvey is often listed as White's film debut, he can be seen in a bit role as an elevator operator in 1947's Gentleman's Agreement). While he has appeared in some 60 films, White is best known for his TV work, which allowed him to play Runyon-esque gangsters, theatrical agents, neurotic TV talk show hosts, art connoisseurs, toy manufacturers, and whatever else suited his fancy. Two of his longest professional associations were with satirist Stan Freberg (White was featured in several of Freberg's commercials and comedy albums) and comedian/TV mogul Danny Thomas (White played agent Jesse Leeds during the first few seasons of Make Room for Daddy). In the 1970s, White became established as the "lonely" Maytag repairman in a series of well-circulated TV commercials; when he stepped down from this role in the late '80s, the event received a generous amount of press coverage. Jesse White was still in harness into the 1990s. In 1992, he was memorably cast as a sarcastic, cigar-chomping theater chain owner in Joe Dante's Matinee. He passed away at age 79 following complications from surgery on January 8, 1997.

Trivia: Armed with extensive radio and stage credits, Arthur Franz made his first film appearance in 1948's Jungle Patrol. Franz has been prominently featured in a number of "fantastic" films: he played one-third of the title role in Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man (1951), and had leads in Flight to Mars (1952), Invaders From Mars (1953), and The Atomic Submarine (1960). He has also thrived in military characterizations in films like Sands of Iwo Jima (1949), Submarine Command (1951), and The Caine Mutiny (1954). His finest screen portrayal was as the psychopathic "hero" of Stanley Kramer's The Sniper (1952). Arthur Franz flourished as a character actor into the 1980s, retiring from films after appearing in That Championship Season (1982).

Trivia: Canadian-born actor Stacy Harris was a fixture on American radio and television for decades, with occasional movie roles breaking up those small-screen engagements. Born in Big Timber, Quebec in 1918, he turned to acting full-time after the Second World War. With his authoritative voice, he was a natural for heroic roles and established himself on radio with an eight-year stint on This Is Your FBI. His big-screen debut came in 1951 in Appointment With Danger, an Alan Ladd starring vehicle in which one of the other key players was Jack Webb who, at the time, was also doing his show Dragnet on the radio and about to bring it to television. Harris became a memorable presence in the Dragnet stock company, appearing four times in the series' original 1950s run, as well as in the 1954 feature film of the same name -- these were interspersed with work in hundreds of television episodes across the 1950s and early 1960s. It was in the revived 1960s Dragnet series, however, that he got some of his best screen time, dividing his portrayal between portrayals of criminals and those on the side of the law -- in the former capacity, with his courtly good looks, finely chiseled features and authoritative voice, all a little reminiscent of an older Robert Ryan, he was a regular reminder to viewers that not all criminals look like or comport themselves as criminals. His best work of the series, however, was the last episode in which he appeared, "Forgery: The Ranger." The role of Clifford Ray Owens aka Barney Regal was a tour-de-force for the actor, playing a felon (who was, astoundingly, masquerading as a forest ranger) who is driven as much by serious psychiatric problems as greed. In 25 minutes of screen time, Harris dominates every moment and evokes a huge range of emotions, including sympathy and pity, which was unusual in the writing approach of the series.Harris appeared regularly in Webb's other series in the years before his death in 1973, at age 54.

Trivia: Douglas Evans was a versatile American supporting actor who during his 30-year career appeared in close to 100 films. He also worked on stage and in radio.

Trivia: Broadway actor Richard Gaines made his initial film appearance as Patrick Henry in The Howards of Virginia (1940). Gaines is best-known to modern audiences as Jean Arthur's stuffy suitor C. J. Pendergast in George Stevens' The More the Merrier (1942). Less pompous but no less dignified were his performances as George Washington in DeMille's Unconquered (1947) and Professor Jackson in Flight to Mars (1953). Either by accident or design, Richard Gaines made most of his last screen appearances at MGM, playing DAs, doctors and other briskly professional types.

Trivia: Olan Soule was so familiar as a character actor in movies and television during the 1950s and 1960s -- and right into the 1980s -- that audiences could be forgiven for not even reckoning with his 25-year career on radio. Soule was born in 1909 in La Harpe, Illinois, to a family that reportedly could trace its ancestry back to three passengers on the Mayflower. He began acting in tent shows in his teens, and made his first appearance on radio in 1926. With his rich, expressive voice -- which frequently seemed to belong to characters that audiences thought of as more physically imposing than the slightly built, 135-pound actor -- he quickly found himself in demand for a multitude of roles. Soule ultimately became closely associated with two series, spending more than a decade on the radio soap opera Bachelor's Children, and a nine-year run on The First Nighter, starting in the 1940s. He made the jump to television in 1949, but even in the visual medium his voice was initially part of his fortune -- one of his early movie assignments was as the narrator of the feature film Beyond The Forest (1949), starring Bette Davis. And many of those early on-screen assignments in features were uncredited, such as his appearance as Mr. Krull in Robert Wise's The Day The Earth Stood Still (1951). Still, Soule did attract attention, with his signature thin physique and the fact that he seemed to show up dozens of times a year, all over television and in movies. By the start of the 1960s, he'd amassed literally hundreds of screen appearances, making him one of the most recognizable character actors of the time period.One producer who took full advantage of Soule's skills early and often was Jack Webb, himself a radio veteran, who cast him in well over two dozen episodes of the original in 1950s Dragnet television series, principally in the recurring role of Ray Pinker. When Webb revived Dragnet in the second half of the 1960s, Soule was no less active, showing up at least a half dozen times each season, often in the role of police-lab scientist Ray Murray. Soule's studious, cerebral portrayal of Murray was reminiscent of the lab technician portrayed by Webb himself in He Walked By Night, the movie that led Webb to create Dragnet in the first place. In between those assignments, Soule appeared in dozens of features and was seen on the small screen in everything from Bonanza and Petticoat Junction to My Three Sons and the Herschel Bernardi series Arnie. Later in his career, Soule returned to his roots, lending his vocal talent to the animated series Super Friends.