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: While attending San Diego's St. Augustine High School, Victor Buono appeared in three plays a year - including the title role in Hamlet! After planning to attend medical school, Buono was rechannelled into an acting career, spending the summer of his 18th year at the municipal Globe Theatre in San Diego, then studying drama at Villanova University. He made his first network TV appearance at age 21, playing bearded poet "Bongo Benny" in an episode of 77 Sunset Strip; this led to 45 TV guest spots over the next three years, during which Buono would later claim he always played "Standard Bad Man 49-B. Buonogenerally played characters much older than himself, his expressive facial features and excess weight helping him pull off the deception. Robert Aldrich cast Buono as the third-rate songwriter who leeches off of faded child star Bette Davis in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane (1962). Davis' was opposed to the casting, insisting that Buono was "grotesque," but after filming finished the actress went up to Buono and apologized for her earlier attitude; even more gratifying to Buono was his Oscar nomination for Baby Jane. Buono's greatest period of TV activity were the years between 1964 and 1970, when he was much in demand to play villains of various nationalities and ethnic origins on the many secret-agent programs of the period. As bad as Buono's bad guys were, he always played them with a rogueish twinkle in the eye just to let the audience know it was all in fun. His best remembered roles during the late 1960s were Count Manzeppi on the adventure series Wild Wild West, and King Tut on the weekly campfest Batman. Also during this period Buono began going the talk-show route, regaling audiences with his self-deprecating poetry, most of it centered on his avoirdupois ("I think that I shall never see / My feet"). These appearances led to nightclub and lecture dates, a popular comedy record album, and a slim volume of poems, It Could Be Verse. In the 1970s and 1980s, Buono's screen characters began to veer away from outright villainy; now he was most often seen as pompous intellectuals or shifty con men. That he could also play straight, and with compassion, was proven by Buono's appearance as President Taft in the TV miniseries Backstairs at the White House, wherein he delivered a poignant tribute to the late Mrs. Taft. Victor Buono was 43 when he died suddenly at his ranch home in Apple Valley, California.

Trivia: Throughout Hollywood's golden age and TV's "typecasting" era of the '50s and '60s, there would always be a demand for American actor Dan Tobin. After all, somebody had to play all those stuffed-shirt executives, snotty desk clerks, officious male secretaries, tight-fisted bankers and tuxedoed, mustachioed stiffs to whom the heroine was unhappily engaged before the hero came along. Tobin was a welcome if slightly pompous presence in such films as Woman of the Year (1941), Bachelor and the Bobbysoxer (1947) The Big Clock (1948) and The Love Bug Rides Again (1973). On television, Tobin had semiregular stints on I Married Joan, My Favorite Husband and Perry Mason, as well as innumerable guest bits on sitcoms and anthologies. Dan Tobin was also a frustrated screenwriter, at least according to scenarist George Clayton Johnson; while working together on a 1960 episode of Twilight Zone, Tobin cornered Johnson and described his concept for a fantasy script about a gambler who could read his opponent's minds -- a talent which failed when he came up against an opponent who couldn't speak English!

Trivia: After making his feature-film debut in For Pete's Sake! (1966) and playing a larger supporting role in Bang the Drum Slowly (1973), actor Nicolas Surovy spent the bulk of his career in television movies such as Laura Lansing Slept Here (1988) and Coopersmith (1992). Surovy is the son of opera singer Rise Stevens.

Trivia: American general purpose actor Harlan Warde came to films in 1941 and remained before the cameras until the mid-'60s. During WWII, Warde played many a young man in uniform. Afterwards, he showed up in supporting roles as detectives, doctors, and ministers. One of Harlan Warde's last assignments was the recurring part of Sheriff Brannon on the TV Western series The Virginian (1962-1971).

Trivia: American character actor Harry Holcombe was involved in radio, television and in feature films during the '60s and '70s. Films appearances include The Silencers, The Manchurian Candidate, The Graduate and Fun with Dick and Jane. During the '80s, Holcombe appeared in television commercials.