Raymond Burr's own life story was full of details nobody could verify
Raymond Burr won two Emmys as the unbeatable lawyer Perry Mason, but after his death in 1993 much of his biography proved impossible to confirm. His accounts of what he did around age 12, from ranch work in New Mexico to acting in Vancouver, often contradicted one another.
Born on May 21, 1917, in New Westminster, British Columbia, to a hardware salesman and a pianist, Burr moved to Vallejo, California, with his mother once the marriage ended, when he was six. A child of the Great Depression, he could not afford tuition at the Pasadena Playhouse, though he joined it in 1937, taught on its drama faculty and appeared in some 30 of its plays. His Broadway debut in 1940, a revue called Crazy With the Heat, folded after three months, but The Duke in Darkness in 1944 won him a contract with RKO.
Hollywood mostly cast him as the heavy. Between 1946 and 1957 he made more than 50 films and became a fixture of film noir; historian Alain Silver called his detective in Pitfall both reprehensible and pathetic. He played the suspected killer in Hitchcock's Rear Window in 1954 and appeared in Godzilla, King of the Monsters! in 1956. Burr later joked that he was merely a fat heavy who, at 25, played the fathers of people older than himself.
A rare turn on the right side of the law changed everything. His aggressive prosecutor in A Place in the Sun impressed Gail Patrick and her husband Cornwell Jackson, who pictured him as the district attorney Hamilton Burger when casting CBS's Perry Mason. He ended up as Mason himself for nine seasons from 1957 to 1966, winning Emmys in 1959 and 1961, and returned for 26 television films between 1985 and 1993.
His second series, Ironside, brought six more Emmy nominations and two Golden Globe nominations. He also reprised his Godzilla role in Godzilla 1985. Burr died of liver cancer in 1993.
Source: Raymond Burr
