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: 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: Although never a major star, Danish-born actress Osa Massen made an impact in such 1940s melodramas as A Woman's Face (1941), in which she engages in an outright catfight with heroine Joan Crawford, and the noir thriller Deadline at Dawn (1946), as a woman with something to hide. Trained as a newspaper photographer, Massen (born Aase Madsen) was persuaded by Danish director Alice O'Fredericks to make her acting debut in Kidnapped (1935), a comedy starring Denmark's answer to Shirley Temple, and although Osa had designs on a career as a film cutter, she agreed to appear in a second Danish film, the seemingly lost Bag Københavns Kulisser (1935). A screen test for 20th Century Fox led to a Hollywood contract. Director Edward H. Griffith cast her as a Dutch-Polynesian femme fatale in Honeymoon in Bali (1939), which several reviewers thought she stole outright from nominal stars Madeleine Carroll and Fred MacMurray. Switching to Warner Bros., Massen appeared mainly in potboilers, her best assignment coming on loan to MGM in the aforementioned A Woman's Face, a remake of a Swedish melodrama that had starred Ingrid Bergman, with whom Massen was often compared. Playing leading roles in low-budget productions and supporting parts in Grade-A films, Osa, as many critics pointed out, always made her moments count. She scored as a mystery woman murdered on a train in Background to Danger (1943), a rather fanciful espionage thriller starring George Raft. Deadline at Dawn (1946), in which she played Paul Lukas' daughter, was one of the first true film noirs and Massen was again singled out by several critics. After being continually confused with Ona Munson and Hungarian import Ilona Massey, co-star Gene Raymond persuaded her to change her name to Stefanie Paull for Million Dollar Weekend (1948). She was back to Osa Massen in Rocketship X-M (1950), an early sci-fi thriller and perhaps her best-remembered film. Divorced from Alan Hersholt, the son of character actor Jean Hersholt, Massen was widowed by her second husband, a Beverly Hills physician, in 1953. At that point, she concentrated on television guest roles. After appearing in shows ranging from Perry Mason to Wagon Train, Massen made her final screen appearance in Outcasts of the City (1958), a love story set in Germany and one of the last films released by Republic Pictures. Divorced from her third husband, a Hollywood dentist, she faded completely from public view.

Trivia: Character actress, onscreen from 1957.

Trivia: Born and educated in Austria, actor Ludwig Stossel worked with many of the mittel-European theatrical powerhouses, including the great Max Reinhardt. The Nazi anschluss prompted Stossel to emigrate to England in 1938, where he began his film career. Like many European expatriates, Stossel found plenty of film work in Hollywood of the '40s. The actor has become ingrained in the consciousness of film buffs and Humphrey Bogart cultists for his brief role in Casablanca (1942), wherein he plays a German-Jewish refugee looking forward to leaving for America. Determined to speak nothing but English, Stossel never fails to elicit loud and loving laughter from film audiences by turning to his screen wife to ask for the time: "Liebchen...uh, sweetness-heart...What watch?" Nearly two decades later, Ludwig Stossel enjoyed another wave of public adoration for his appearances in Italian Swiss Colony Wine commercials; he was the little old tyrolean-outfitted fellow who turned to the audience and identified himself (with Jim Backus' dubbed-in voice) as "That li'l old winemaker....me."

Trivia: Raised in Switzerland, Kreuger attended college in London and New York. He began appearing in films in 1943; thanks to his classic Aryan looks and Continental accent he was frequently cast as young Nazis, though he occasionally got romantic leads. Rugged and blond, he became very popular with women, and for a time he was 20th Century-Fox's #3 male pinup. He might have become a star, but he was never cast in suitably central roles. Kreuger became an American citizen in 1944. During the '50s he appeared primarily in European films, then later returned to Hollywood in supporting roles. He last appeared onscreen in 1967, but went on to occasional work on TV. He became a millionaire in Hollywood real estate transactions.

Trivia: Hollywood character actor Ivan Triesault was born in Estonia where he began a theatrical career at age 14. Four years later, he moved to the U.S. where he began formal training in acting and dance in New York and later, in London. Back in New York, he frequently appeared as a mime and dancer on the Radio City Music Hall stage. Following more theatrical acting experience, including a brief stint on Broadway, Triesault broke into films where he usually played foreign villains from the mid-'40s through the early '60s.

Trivia: Over her long career, Lillian Bronson played numerous small character roles in a wide variety of films. The New York City native made her screen debut in The Happy Land (1943) starring Don Ameche. After many film appearances, she branched out into television, working as a regular on shows like Kings Row, where she played Grandma from 1955 to 1956, and Date With the Angels between 1957 and 1958. Bronson also guest starred on numerous television shows, especially Westerns like The Rifleman, Have Gun Will Travel, and The Guns of Will Sonnett.