RAYMOND BURR

'Raymond William Stacey Burr' (May 21 1917 – September 12, 1993) was an Emmy-nominated actor and vintner, perhaps best known for his roles in the television dramas ''Perry Mason'' and ''Ironside''.

Contents

Biography

Early life

Early career

''Perry Mason'' & ''Ironside''

Other works

Personal life

Philanthropy

The Raymond Burr Performing Arts Centre

Burr in popular culture

References

External links

Biography

Early life

The oldest of three children, Burr was born in New Westminister, British Columbia, Canada, to William Johnston Burr, an Irish hardware salesman from County Cork Ireland, and his wife Minerva (Smith), a concert pianist and music teacher^[1] who immigrated to Canada from Chicago, Illinois in 1914.

Early career

Burr began his acting career at the Pasadena Playhouse in 1937. In 1941, he landed his first Broadway role in “Crazy with the Heart”. He became a contract player at RKO studio, playing mostly villains. He had roles in over 60 movies between 1946 and 1957. Burr received favourable notice for his role as a prosecutor in the 1951 film ''A Place in the Sun'', co-starring Montgomery Clift, and perhaps his best-known film role of the period was in Alfred Hitchcock's ''Rear Window'', starring James Stewart.
Burr also emerged as a prolific 1950s television character actor. Burr made his guest-starring television debut on an episode of: ''The Amazing Dr. Malone''. The part led to other television roles in the programs ''Dragnet'', ''Chesterfield Sound Off Time'', ''Four Star Playhouse'', ''Mr. & Mrs. North'', ''Schlitz Playhouse of Stardom'', ''The Ford Television Theatre'', ''Lux Video Theatre'', he also played Steve Martin in Godzilla, King of the Monsters!, and again in Godzilla 1985, and many others.

''Perry Mason'' & ''Ironside''

In 1956, Burr auditioned for the title role of ''Perry Mason'', a new courtroom drama that had been created by Erle Stanley Gardner. Burr won the part, which eventually became the role Burr was most closely identified with in the public mind. Also starring were 1940s movie actress and old friend of Burr’s Barbara Hale as Mason’s secretary, Della Street, and B-actor William Hopper as Mason’s private investigator, Paul Drake. William Talman played the district attorney, Hamilton Burger (who was destined to lose every case, at least against Perry Mason) and Ray Collins was the Homicide Detective, Lt. Arthur Tragg. On every show Mason built a defense case with extraordinary precision and succeeded in proving his client's innocence, often provoking an emotional confession from the true culprit.
Burr won two Emmy awards for his role as Perry Mason. The program originally ran from 1957 - 1966, and has been re-run in syndication ever since. In 2006, the first season became available on DVD.
Burr moved from CBS to Universal, where he auditioned for the title role in the television drama ''Ironside''. On the pilot episode, San Francisco Chief of Detectives Robert T. Ironside was shot, survived the murder attempt, but was paralyzed for life from the waist down. This role gave Burr another hit series, the first crime drama show ever to star a disabled police officer. The program ran from 1967 to 1975. In 1977, Burr starred in the short-lived TV series ''.
In 1985, Burr was approached by producers Dean Hargrove and Christian Nyby to star in a made-for-TV movie ''Perry Mason Returns'', which reunited him with former co-star and longtime friend, Barbara Hale, again as Della Street. The rest of the original cast had died, but Hale's real-life son William Katt was cast in the TV movie as Paul Drake, Jr. The success of the first movie led to Burr making twenty-six more before his death eight years later in 1993.

Other works

A young Burr, with the international success of ''Godzilla'', and shortly after starring on the radio drama Fort Laramie, was chosen to star in 1957 in Perry Mason where he played Erle Stanley Gardner's clever defense attorney who always defended the innocent and only lost one case ("The Case of the Deadly Verdict," 10/17/1963; his client withheld evidence needed to win). The show was very popular and lasted nine years. In 1967, Burr started another long running television series Ironside (known as A Man Called Ironside in the UK) in which he played a wheelchair-bound police chief. This show ran until 1975. Subsequent to this, Burr had a couple of other short-lived series such as Kingston: Confidential but was unable to repeat his earlier hits. He co-starred in such TV films as Love's Savage Fury (1979), Eischied: Only The Pretty Girls Die (1979), Disaster On The Coastliner (1979), The Curse Of King Tut's Tomb (1980), The Night The City Screamed (1980), Peter And Paul (1981), and They Call Me MISTER Bonobo! (1982). Burr also had a supporting role in Dennis Hopper's controversial film Out of the Blue (1980) and spoofed his Perry Mason image in Airplane II: The Sequel (1982). In 1985, Burr made a comeback as Perry Mason and made a series of 26 two-hour movies that were enormous ratings blockbusters, the last being completed only a few weeks prior to his death. By this time he was largely wheelchair-bound (in his final Mason movie, he is always shown either sitting, or standing while leaning on a table, but never standing unsupported), as his character in Ironside had been, but this time due to his real-life failing health. He also reprised the role of Ironside not long before his death, having to dye his hair red and shave off his trademark beard in order not to look too much like Perry Mason.
Burr also worked as as media spokesman for the now-defunct British Columbia-based real estate company Block Bros. in TV, radio, and print ads during late 1970s and early 1980s.^[2]

Personal life

In his younger years, Burr was rumoured to be romantically involved with Natalie Wood. "When I was talking to Dennis Hopper about that," Wood biographer Suzanne Finstad says, "he was saying, I just can't wrap my mind around that one. But you know, I saw them together. They were definitely a couple. Who knows what was going on there?".
Burr's official biography stated that he had been previously married, but both his wives and one child had died. In 1942, while working in London, he met Annette Sutherland, an aspiring actress from Scotland and that year they married. Despite protests from her husband, Sutherland insisted on fulfilling her contract and traveled to Spain with the tour company while Burr returned to America. Shortly before her death, Burr received a letter that Sutherland was working in Spain and would return to England and then America; Sutherland then boarded a flight from Lisbon to London and it has been widely reported that Sutherland then perished on BOAC Flight 777-A, the same flight that claimed actor Leslie Howard. However, Burr’s biographer Ona L. Hill writes that “no one by the name of Annette Sutherland Burr was listed as a passenger on the plane” and that Sutherland was on a separate commercial plane traveling between Lisbon and London around the same time as Flight 777-A, which was also shot down by the Germans. Raymond Burr: A Film, Radio and Television Biography, , Ona L., Hill, Hill McFarland & Company, 1999, ISBN 0-7864-0833-2 In truth, however, only one of Burr's wives, Isabella Ward, can actually be documented. The other two, including Annette Sutherland, do not seem to have ever existed (Sutherland was said to be a British actress, yet British Equity has no record of anyone by that name). The same goes for Burr's "son," who is said to have died from an incurable disease sometime in the 1950s. Since Burr was already a known presence in Hollywood, it would seem logical that this tragedy would be widely reported in the press, as was the tragic death of Red Skelton's teenaged son Richard from leukemia in the late fifties. Yet there is no record anywhere of the "son's" birth, existence, or death, which strongly implies "he" never existed. One possible explanation for this cynically bizarre deceit is that by claiming such a heart-wrenching personal "history," Burr could scare reporters into backing off from digging into his personal life (the actor was known to be gay, which at the time was ruinous for a popular TV star).
Burr's parents, William and Minerva, remarried in 1955 after 33 years of separation. Burr had remained very close to them, both during their separation and after they remarried. In early 1974, Minerva died of cancer at 81, and eleven years later, in 1985, his father, William died at 96 of natural causes.
"Perry Mason" started in 1957, shortly after actor Tab Hunter was arrested in an infamous homosexual raid. During the run of the series, Burr kept fairly private, perhaps because his co-star William Hopper (Paul Drake) was the son of gossip columnist Hedda Hopper. Still, author Robert Hofler alleges in his 2005 book, ''The Man Who Invented Rock Hudson: The Pretty Boys and Dirty Deals of Henry Willson'', that Burr and Rock Hudson hosted gay parties at a rented home in Palm Springs, California.
Around 1958, Raymond Burr started living with former actor Robert Benevides. They remained together, as both a couple and as business partners, for 35 years until Burr's death. Sonoma County residents were well acquainted with Burr and Benevides, who together owned and operated first an orchid business, then a vineyard in the Dry Creek Valley.^[3] Burr was devoted to his longtime hobby, cultivating and hybridizing orchids. He later developed this passion into an orchid business. Burr even developed an orchid he named the Barbara Hale Orchid.^[4]
Burr bought 4,000 acres (1600 ha) on the the island of Naitauba, Fiji in 1965 which he later sold in 1983 to self claimed guru Adi Da.^[5]
In January 1993, Burr was diagnosed with kidney cancer in his left kidney. He refused to undergo surgery, as this would have interfered with the shooting schedule of his final two TV movies. After shooting, he went back to visit the doctors and discovered the cancer had spread to several organs, making it inoperable. Burr died on September 12, 1993 on his Sonoma County, California ranch in near Healdsburg, California at age 76.^[6] Burr is interred with his parents at Fraser Cemetery, New Westminster, British Columbia, Canada. The WGS84 coordinates of his grave plot are N49° 13.338 W122° 53.892.
On October 1, 1993, friends of Burr and Benevides mourned Burr at the Pasadena Playhouse in Pasadena, California. The private memorial was attended by Barbara Hale, Don Galloway, Don Mitchell, Barbara Anderson, Elizabeth Baur, Dean Hargrove, William R. Moses and Christian Nyby.

Philanthropy

In contrast to the "bad guys" and hard, unbending heroes he often played, Raymond Burr was in real life a generous man who gave enormous sums of money (including his salaries from the Perry Mason movies) to charity. He once sponsored 27 foster children through the Christian Children's Fund. He would take the children with the greatest medical needs. Burr always insisted that TV executives and directors treated his co-stars with the same respect shown to him. He also gave generously over many years to the McGeorge School of Law in Sacramento, California.
Burr was heavily involved in raising money for The Bailey-Matthews Shell Museum in Sanibel, Florida .

The Raymond Burr Performing Arts Centre

The Raymond Burr Performing Arts Centre in New Westminster, British Columbia opened in October 2000 near a city block bearing the family name of Burr. Originally a movie theatre under ownership of the Famous Players chain (as the Columbia Theatre) and at present a 238-seat intimate theatre, plans exist to expand the theatre to become a 650-seat regional performing arts facility. Since the theatre began producing plays, it has been the custom always to have a picture of Raymond Burr included somewhere on each set, and the first toast on the opening night of every production is always dedicated to his memory. The Centre is commonly referred to as the Burr Theatre, or simply as "the Burr".
Raymond Burr has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6656 Hollywood Blvd.

Burr in popular culture

In the episode ''Tokyo Grows'' of Pinky and The Brain, a man repeatedly appears interjecting with the phrase "Yes, I see." This is a parody of the original Godzilla film Gojira which was released in America as Godzilla, King of the Monsters. The American version contained spliced footage of Burr whose most common line was "Yes, I see".
He was referenced in Beastie Boys' B-Boy Bouillabaisse from the Paul's Boutique album: "I ride around town like Raymond Burr". In an episode of ''Married...with Children'', Al Bundy confuses a TV Guide cover shot of Delta Burke as that of Raymond Burr

References

1. http://www.burrtheatre.com/raymond.html
2. Headlines from the first 100 issues of REM
3. . Nonetheless, one of Burr's niece's had a public feud with Benevides questioning whether or not he should be given the bulk of the estate.
Raymond Burr Vineyards: History
4. Not all attractions in Bay Area cost a small fortune
5. Guru hit by sex-slave suit
6. Raymond Burr, Actor, 76, Dies; Played Perry Mason and Ironside William Grimes

External links

★ Raymond Burr Vineyards

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★ Raymond Burr at the MBC Encyclopedia of Television

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★ French biography of Raymond Burr

★ Raymond Burr Performing Arts Centre - New Westminster, BC