Raymond Burr
| Raymond Burr | ||
 Burr in 1968 | ||
| Background information | ||
| Born as: | Raymond William Stacy Burr | |
| Born | May 21, 1917 New Westminster, British Columbia, Canada | |
| Died | Sep 12, 1993 - age 75 Healdsburg, California, U.S. | |
| Partner(s): | Robert Benevides (1960–1993) | |
| Spouse(s): | Isabella Ward (1948 - 1952) div | |
| Occupation: | Actor | |
| Years active: | 1934–1993 | |
Raymond William Stacy Burr (✦May 21, 1917 – †September 12, 1993) was a Canadian actor known for his lengthy Hollywood film career and his title roles in television dramas Perry Mason and Ironside.
Burr's early acting career included roles on Broadway, radio, television, and film, usually as the villain. His portrayal of the suspected murderer in the Alfred Hitchcock thriller Rear Window (1954) is his best-known film role, although he is also remembered for his role in the 1956 film Godzilla, King of the Monsters!, which he reprised in the 1985 film Godzilla 1985. He won Emmy Awards for acting in 1959 and 1961 for the role of Perry Mason, which he played for nine seasons (1957–1966) and reprised in a series of 26 Perry Mason TV movies (1985–1993). His second TV series, Ironside, earned him six Emmy and two Golden Globe nominations.
Burr died of cancer in 1993, and his personal life came into question, as many details of his biography appeared to be unverifiable. He was ranked number 44 of the 50 Greatest TV Stars of All Time by TV Guide magazine in 1996.
Early life
Raymond William Stacy Burr was born May 21, 1917, in New Westminster, British Columbia. His father William Johnston Burr (1889–1985) was a hardware salesman; his mother Minerva Annette (née Smith, 1892–1974) was a pianist and music teacher.
When Burr was six, his parents divorced. His mother moved to Vallejo, California, with him and his younger siblings Geraldine and James, while his father remained in New Westminster. Burr briefly attended San Rafael Military Academy in San Rafael, California, and graduated from Berkeley High School.
In 1986, he told journalist Jane Ardmore that, when he was 12 years old, his mother sent him to New Mexico for a year to work as a ranch hand. (As with many of Burr's self-reported autobiographical details about his early life, this is unverified and essentially unverifiable.) According to Burr's story, he was already his full adult height and rather large and "had fallen in with a group of college-aged kids who didn't realize how young Raymond was, and they let him tag along with them in activities and situations far too sophisticated for him to handle." In the same article, Burr also states he developed a passion for growing things and joined the Civilian Conservation Corps for a year in his teens. He did acting work in his teen years, making his stage debut at age 12 with a Vancouver stock company. The number of experiences Burr spoke about having had at or around the age of 12 (working in radio in San Francisco, spending a year in New Mexico, appearing in Vancouver theatre, working for the Civilian Conservation Corps) are sometimes mutually contradictory; this would be a pattern that would recur with Burr's autobiographical reminiscences about much of his pre-Perry Mason personal life.
Theatre
Burr grew up during the Great Depression and hoped to study acting at the Pasadena Playhouse, but he was unable to afford the tuition. By his own account, in 1934 he joined a repertory theatre group in Toronto that toured throughout Canada, then joined another company that toured India, Australia, and England. He briefly attended Long Beach Junior College and taught at San Jose Junior College for a semester, working nights as a radio actor and singer. Burr began his association with the Pasadena Playhouse[3]: 9 in 1937.
Burr moved to New York in 1940 and made his first Broadway appearance in Crazy With the Heat, a two-act musical revue produced by Kurt Kasznar. Despite the veteran cast of stars Willie Howard, Luella Gear, and Gracie Barrie, the show folded after three months. Burr's first starring role on the stage came in November 1942 when he was an emergency replacement in a Pasadena Playhouse production of Quiet Wedding. He became a member of the Pasadena Playhouse drama faculty for 18 months, and he performed in some 30 plays over the years. He returned to Broadway for Patrick Hamilton's The Duke in Darkness (1944), a psychological drama set during the French Wars of Religion. His performance as the loyal friend of the imprisoned protagonist led to a contract with RKO Radio Pictures.
Film
Lars Thorwald realizes that he is being watched across the courtyard by telephoto lens in Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window (1954), which offered Burr his most notable film role.
Burr appeared in more than 50 feature films between 1946 and 1957, creating an array of villains that established him as an icon of film noir. Film historian Alain Silver concluded that Burr's most significant work in the genre is in ten films: Desperate (1947), Sleep, My Love (1948), Raw Deal (1948), Pitfall (1948), Abandoned (1949), Red Light (1949), M (1951), His Kind of Woman (1951), The Blue Gardenia (1953), and Crime of Passion (1957). Silver described Burr's private detective in Pitfall as "both reprehensible and pathetic," a characterization also cited by film historian Richard Schickel as a prototype of film noir, in contrast with the appealing television characters for which Burr later became famous. "He tried to make you see the psychosis below the surface, even when the parts weren't huge," said film historian James Ursini. "He was able to bring such complexity and different levels to those characters, and create sympathy for his characters even though they were doing reprehensible things."
Other titles in Burr's film noir legacy include Walk a Crooked Mile (1948), Borderline (1950), Unmasked (1950), The Whip Hand (1951), FBI Girl (1951), Meet Danny Wilson (1952), Rear Window (1954), They Were So Young (1954), A Cry in the Night (1956), and Affair in Havana (1957). His villains were also seen in Westerns, period dramas, horror films, and adventure films.
"I was just a fat heavy," Burr told journalist James Bawden. "I split the heavy parts with Bill Conrad. We were both in our twenties playing much older men. I never got the girl but I once got the gorilla in a 3-D picture called Gorilla at Large. I menaced Claudette Colbert, Lizabeth Scott, Paulette Goddard, Anne Baxter, Barbara Stanwyck. Those girls would take one look at me and scream and can you blame them? I was drowned, beaten, stabbed and all for my art. But I knew I was horribly overweight. I lacked any kind of self esteem. At 25 I was playing the fathers of people older than me."
Burr's occasional roles on the right side of the law include the aggressive prosecutor in A Place in the Sun (1951). His courtroom performance in that film made an impression on Gail Patrick and her husband Cornwell Jackson, who had Burr in mind when they began casting the role of Los Angeles district attorney Hamilton Burger in the CBS-TV series Perry Mason.
- More information is available at [ Wikipedia:Raymond_Burr ]
External links
- Raymond Burr at the Internet Movie Database
- https://www.famousfix.com/topic/robert-benevides-and-raymond-burr Burr and BeaaQ3nevides as a couple
- Raymond Burr https://web.archive.org/web/20150216060804/http://www.museum.tv/eotv/burrraymond.htm Date: February 16, 2015 at the MBC Encyclopedia of Television
- Complete biography of Raymond Burr
- Raymond Burr at the Turner Classic Movie Database
- Raymond Burr at the Internet Broadway Database
- Raymond Burr at Find a Grave
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