Raymond Burr
	Date of Birth: 5/21/1917 - New Westminster, British Columbia, Canada Date of Death: 9/12/1993 - Sonoma, California
	Filmography Without Reservations (1946) - Paul Gill San Quentin (1946) - Torrance Pitfall (1948) - Mack MacDonald Walk a Crooked Mile (1948) - Krebs Love Happy (1949) - Alphonse Zoto The Adventures of Don Juan (1949) - Captain Alvarez M (1951) - Pottsy Serpent of the Nile (1953) - Mark Antony Rear Window (1954) - Lars Thorwald A Man Alone (1955) - Stanely Godzilla: King of the Monsters (1956) - Steve Martin Crime of Passion (1957) - Tony Pope Perry Mason TV Series (1957-1966) - Perry Mason Ironside (1967) - Robert Ironside Ironside TV Series (1967-1975) Centennial (1978) - Herman Bockweiss The Curse of King Tut's Tomb (1980) - Sebastian Airplane II: The Sequal (1982) - Judge Godzilla 1985 (1984) - Steve Martin 26 Perry Mason TV Films (1985-1993) - Perry Mason The Return of Ironside (1993) PLUS MANY, MANY MORE!!!
Mini Biography
Born on May 21, 1917, Raymond Burr didn’t exactly have the picture perfect childhood. For the first ten years of his life, he moved from town to town with his mother, a single parent who supported her children by playing the organ in movie houses and churches. To aid his family, Raymond would take on odd jobs that were usually meant for adults, but given his large size he was able to perform them well enough. He did this until he was 19 years old, when he met a film director by the name of Anatole Litvak, who gave Burr a job at a Toronto summer-stock theater, which led to him going on tour with an English rep company and finding his first wife. After this, Burr began to study acting and took courses on the subject at several universities until his first theatrical break came in 1943 in a play called “Duke in Darkness”. Later that year his wife was killed in a plane crash, and a distraught Burr quit the theater and joined the Navy for two years, but then returned to the United States with his four-year-old son, Michael Burr. Attempting to return to the theater, Raymond Burr was told he was too overweight to star in films, so Burr went on a long, six month diet and emerged at 210 pounds from his former 340. Satisfied with his weight loss, Hollywood agents hired him for his first film role in 1946, a small role as Claudette Colbert’s dancing partner in the film “Without Reservations”. After his next film, San Quentin, Burr spent the next ten years playing villains in films, a role which he really enjoyed. Then, in 1956, he was hired to star as reporter Steve Martin in the English-language scenes of the Godzilla: King of the Monsters, which was released in Japan in 1954 and the U.S. in 1956. Raymond Burr would reprise this role almost thirty years later when “The Return of Godzilla” came to the United States under the title, “Godzilla 1985”. During his stint as a villain in films, Burr worked steadily on radio and television, but couldn’t seem to land a role on a television series. However, in 1957, he was tested for the role of district attorney Hamilton Burger for the TV series Perry Mason. Burr agreed to try out for the part, but only if he was given a shot at being the lead character in the series, Perry Mason. Burr tried out for both parts, but when Perry mason creator Erle Gardner saw Raymond Burr’s test for Perry Mason’s role, he knew that he was the man for the role. Raymond Burr continued to play Perry Mason until the series was cancelled in 1966, but he did win three Emmy Awards along the way. After Perry Mason was cancelled, Burr returned to TV less than a year later in the weekly detective series Ironside, which ran from 1967 until 1975. After this, Burr did bit-parts in films and in TV series, but his most famous appearances from this point on were in 26 two-hour Perry Mason specials between 1986 and 1993. Toward the end of the specials, Burr discovered that her had kidney cancer in late 1992, but instead of slowing down on the Mason special, he continued his hard work on filming the last Perry Mason TV movie and taking a trip to Europe. In his final weeks, Burr only saw his closest friends and even held farewell parties for himself. Raymond Burr passed away on September 12, 1993 due to liver cancer.