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: Born in New York City while his father Noah Beery Sr. was appearing on-stage, Noah Beery Jr. was given his lifelong nickname, "Pidge," by Josie Cohan, sister of George M. Cohan "I was born in the business," Pidge Beery observed some 63 years later. "I couldn't have gotten out of it if I wanted to." In 1920, the younger Beery made his first screen appearance in Douglas Fairbanks' The Mark of Zorro (1920), which co-starred dad Noah as Sergeant Garcia. Thanks to a zoning mistake, Pidge attended the Hollywood School for Girls (his fellow "girls" included Doug Fairbanks Jr. and Jesse Lasky Jr.), then relocated with his family to a ranch in the San Fernando Valley, miles from Tinseltown. While some kids might have chafed at such isolation, Pidge loved the wide open spaces, and upon attaining manhood emulated his father by living as far away from Hollywood as possible. After attending military school, Pidge pursued film acting in earnest, appearing mostly in serials and Westerns, sometimes as the hero, but usually as the hero's bucolic sidekick. His more notable screen credits of the 1930s and '40s include Of Mice and Men (1939), Only Angels Have Wings (again 1939, this time as the obligatory doomed-from-the-start airplane pilot), Sergeant York (1941), We've Never Been Licked (1943), and Red River (1948). He also starred in a group of rustic 45-minute comedies produced by Hal Roach in the early '40s, and was featured in several popular B-Western series; one of these starred Buck Jones, whose daughter Maxine became Pidge's first wife. Perhaps out of a sense of self-preservation, Beery appeared with his camera-hogging uncle Wallace Beery only once, in 1940's 20 Mule Team. Children of the 1950s will remember Pidge as Joey the Clown on the weekly TV series Circus Boy (1956), while the more TV-addicted may recall Beery's obscure syndicated travelogue series, co-starring himself and his sons. The 1960s found Pidge featured in such A-list films as Inherit the Wind (1960) and as a regular on the series Riverboat and Hondo. He kicked off the 1970s in the role of Michael J. Pollard's dad (there was a resemblance) in Little Fauss and Big Halsey. Though Beery was first choice for the part of James Garner's father on the TV detective series The Rockford Files, Pidge was committed to the 1973 James Franciscus starrer Doc Elliot, so the Rockford producers went with actor Robert Donley in the pilot episode. By the time The Rockford Files was picked up on a weekly basis, Doc Elliot had tanked, thus Donley was dropped in favor of Beery, who stayed with the role until the series' cancellation in 1978. Pidge's weekly-TV manifest in the 1980s included Quest (1981) and The Yellow Rose (1983). After a brief illness, Noah Beery Jr. died at his Tehachapi, CA, ranch at the age of 81.

Trivia: Born Gloria Wood, the daughter of Hollywood filmmaker Sam Wood, K.T. Stevens began appearing on-stage and in films in childhood. She initially billed herself as Katharine Stevens. She played leads and supporting roles in numerous films during the '40s and '50s. Eventually she became a character actress. On television, she guest starred in numerous series and played Peggy Mercer on the soap General Hospital. She also played Helen Martin on the soap Days of Our Lives. At one time, she was married to actor Hugh Marlowe.

Trivia: It's quite possible that Hugh Marlowe might have been limited to film comedy roles had he retained his given name of Hugh Herbert Hipple, but it's not likely that he would have garnered many laughs. A radio announcer and stage performer, Marlowe had a brief leading-man filing in the late 1930s, but was more effective from the mid-1940s onward as a second lead and character actor. His stiff, humorless demeanor served him well in many second parts at 20th Century-Fox in the 1950s. Director Howard Hawks cleverly exploited Marlowe's solemnity by casting the actor as foil to the childish antics of "fountain of youth" partaker Cary Grant in Monkey Business (1952). Marlowe also showed up in several science fiction films, notably The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), Earth vs. the Flying Saucers (1956) and World Without End (1956), wherein his somber approach lent a measure of credence to the proceedings. On television, Hugh Marlowe played Ellery Queen (a role he'd previously essayed on radio) in a 1954 syndicated series, and was the last of four actors to portray Jim Matthews on the NBC daytime drama Another World.

Trivia: A pretty, athletic leading lady with a refreshing down-to-earth quality, Cathy Downs worked as a model before signing a 20th Century-Fox contract in 1944. She was co-starred in several major Fox productions of the postwar years, and played the title role in John Ford's My Darling Clementine (1946). Inexplicably, however, her career degenerated after 1947 into lower-berth programmers and cheap horror films like She-Creature (1956) and The Amazing Colossal Man (1957). Cathy Downs was married to actor/producer Joe Kirkwood, with whom she appeared in the Joe Palooka TV series of the early 1950s.

Trivia: A graduate of the University of Michigan, Strother Martin was the National Junior Springboard Diving Champion when he came to Hollywood as a swimming coach in the late 1940s. He stuck around Lala-land to play a few movie bits and extra roles before finally receiving a role of substance in The Asphalt Jungle (1950). Lean and limber in his early day, Martin was frequently cast in parts which called upon his athletic prowess (e.g. a drawling big-league ball player in 1951's Rhubarb). As his face grew more pocked and his body more paunched with each advancing year, Martin put his reedy, whiny voice and sinister squint to excellent use as a villain, most often in westerns. It took him nearly 20 years to matriculate from character actor to character star. In 1967, Martin skyrocketed to fame as the sadistic prison-farm captain in Cool Hand Luke: his character's signature line, "What we have here is a failure t' communicate," became a national catchphrase. While he continued accepting secondary roles for the rest of his career, Martin was awarded top billing in two sleazy but likeable programmers, Brotherhood of Satan (1971) and Ssssssss (1973). A veteran of scores of television shows, Strother Martin was seen on a weekly basis as Aaron Donager in Hotel De Paree (1959) and as star Jimmy Stewart's country cousin in Hawkins (1973).

Trivia: American leading man Robert Colbert made his first screen appearances as a Columbia contract player in the late '50s. His most thankless role during this period was as the romantic lead in the Three Stooges feature Have Rocket, Will Travel (1959). Seven years later, Colbert had another crack at the sci-fi genre as adventuresome scientist Dr. Doug Phillips on TV's The Time Tunnel. Each week, Colbert and co-star James Darren were plunked down into a crucial moment in world history, courtesy of the 20th Century-Fox stock footage department. In between these two assignments, Colbert played Brent Maverick, one of the stop-gap characters created to cover the defection of James Garner on the western series Maverick (1957-62). Daytime drama devotees are most familiar with Robert Colbert's decade-long tenure as Stuart Brooks on The Young and the Restless.

Trivia: American character actor William Joseph Keene is best remembered for playing the preacher on the Andy Griffith Show and re-creating the same role on Mayberry, RFD.