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: Rugged-looking American actor John Bryant is best remembered as the original "Marlboro Man" from the 1950s. He went on to play Dr. Robert Spaulding on the TV western, The Virginian. Bryant has subsequently played numerous character roles on a variety of television series ranging from westerns through sitcoms. He has appeared on Broadway and on stages throughout the country. Bryant also acted in films during the '50s and '60s.

Trivia: Heavy-built major star of the silent era, Bushman was once known as "the handsomest man in the world." He began acting with stock companies while still a boy, remaining a stage actor until he entered film in 1911, beginning with the Essanay company in Chicago. At one time a sculpter's model, Bushman had a beautiful physique which, combined with his handsome looks, soon propelled him to stardom in pre '20s silents; he rushed from one movie set to another, playing romantic leads in scores of films and becoming immensely popular with female viewers. His popularity took a nose-dive, however, after it was revealed that he had been secretly married to actress Beverly Bayne, his costar in many films including Romeo and Juliet (1916). He continued to perform in numerous films, leading up to his most famous role as the Roman Massala (Ramon Novarro's screen rival) in the silent Ben-Hur (1926). During the silent era he made more than a million dollars a year, but his fortune was entirely lost in the Crash of 1929. By the early '30s his film career was all but over, though he rebuilt himself financially by becoming a star of radio soap operas. After 1930 he appeared in films only sporadically, though some of his roles were still of interest. His last appearance was in a schlocky low-budget '60s production, The Ghost in the Invisible Bikini (1966, the year of his death).

Trivia: California-born Jeanette Nolan racked up an impressive list of radio and stage credits in the 1930s, including a stint with Orson Welles' Mercury Theatre troupe. She made her film debut in 1948 in Welles' MacBeth; her stylized, Scottish-burred interpretation of Lady MacBeth was almost universally panned by contemporary critics, but her performance holds up superbly when seen today. Afterwards, Ms. Nolan flourished as a character actress, her range extending from society doyennes to waterfront hags. She appeared in countless TV programs, and played the rambunctious title role on the short-lived Western Dirty Sally (1974). Nolan made her final film appearance playing Robert Redford's mother in The Horse Whisperer (1998). From 1937, Jeanette Nolan was married to actor John McIntire, with whom she frequently co-starred; she was also the mother of actor Tim McIntire.

Trivia: Actor John Banner was forced out of his native Austria in 1938 when Hitler marched in. Though most familiar to filmgoers and TV viewers as a man of considerable heft, he was a trim 180 pounds when, while touring with an acting troupe in Switzerland, he found he couldn't return to Austria because he was Jewish. Banner came to America as a refugee; though unable to speak a word of English, he was almost immediately hired as emcee for a musical revue, From Vienna, for which he had to learn all his lines phonetically. Picking up the language rapidly, Banner was cast in several films of the 1940s, starting with Pacific Blackout. Because of his accent and Teutonic features, he most often played Nazi spies -- a grim task, in that Banner's entire family in Austria was wiped out in the concentration camps. Tipping the scales at 280 pounds in the 1950s, Banner worked steadily as a character man in films and on television; he can be seen as a variety of foreign-official types on such vintage TV series as The Adventures of Superman and Rocky Jones, Space Ranger. In 1965, Banner was cast as Sgt. Schultz in the long-running wartime sitcom Hogan's Heroes. A far cry from the villainous Nazis he'd played in the 1940s, Schultz was a pixieish, lovable blimp of a man who'd rather have been working as a toymaker than spending the war guarding American POWS, and who, to protect his own skin, overlooked the irregularities occurring in Stalag 13 (which as every TV fan knows was Colonel Hogan's secret headquarters for American counterespionage) by bellowing "I know nothing! I see nothing! Nothing!" John Banner enjoyed playing Schultz, but bristled whenever accused of portraying a cuddly Nazi: "I see Schultz as the representative of some kind of goodness in every generation," the actor told TV Guide in 1967. As to the paradox of an Austrian Jew playing a representative of Hitler's Germany, Banner replied, "Who can play Nazis better than us Jews?" Or who could play them funnier than John Banner?

Trivia: Character actor Gage Clarke came to television (and then movies) after spending considerable time on-stage during the 1930s and 1940s. In addition to anthology series including Lux Video Theatre and Kraft Theatre, his list of small-screen credits included roles on Mr. Peepers and appearances in multiple episodes of Maverick and Gunsmoke (where he had the recurring role of Mr. Botkin). With his heavyset build, graying hair, and dignified bearing and diction, he was often cast as judges and clergymen later in his career, including a meaty role in Paul Landres' underrated horror opus The Return of Dracula (1958), in which he played the reverend who helps identify the threat of vampirism that has descended on a small California town. He also cut a memorable dramatic figure in the Twilight Zone episode "One More Pallbearer", as the minister who refuses to be cowed into abandoning his principles by megalomaniac millionaire Joseph Wiseman. Clarke stood in well with the Disney organization, which used him in Pollyanna (1960), The Absent-Minded Professor (1961) and The Monkey's Uncle (1965), the latter released the year after his death. His other feature film work included major roles in Mervyn LeRoy's The Bad Seed (1956) and Robert Wise's I Want to Live.

Trivia: Character actor James Chandler is best remembered for playing Inspector Regan in the popular 1950s TV series Tracer. He continued working in TV action shows and movies. Later, he moved to working in commercials. In addition to his television work, Chandler also appeared in a few films and in theatrical productions in the San Francisco area.

Trivia: Many research sources arbitrarily begin the list of French actor Eugene Borden's films in 1936. In fact, Borden first showed up on screen as early as 1917. Seldom afforded billing, the actor was nonetheless instantly recognizable in his many appearances as headwaiters, porters, pursers and coachmen. Along with several other stalwart European character actors, Borden was cast in a sizeable role in the above-average Columbia "B" So Dark the Night (1946). Musical buffs will recall Eugene Borden as Gene Kelly and Oscar Levant's landlord in An American in Paris (1951).