Raymond Burr, the portly actor who menaced James Stewart in Rear Window, reported the horrors of Godzilla and became a courtroom hero in the long-running Perry Mason TV series, died of metastatic cancer of the liver Sunday night at his ranch in Dry Creek, Calif. He was 76.
Despite his illness, Mr. Burr had completed location work in mid-August in Denver for his last Perry Mason TV film, The Case of the Killer Kiss.
Perry Mason became television’s most successful lawyer series starting in 1957. It appeared weekly on CBS for nine seasons, until 1966.
The formula for the character created by author Erle Stanley Gardner was always the same: Aided by investigator Paul Drake (William Hopper) and secretary Della Street (Barbara Hale), Mason ferreted out the truth and foiled prosecutor Hamilton Burger (William Talman) at trial’s end, often with a dramatic courtroom confession from the real culprit.
Perry Mason was an immediate ratings winner, and also brought on romantic speculation about Della Street’s relationship with the lawyer.
“Mason has got to reflect an attitude, because certain people would say, ‘Is he sleeping with Della Street, and if not, why not?'” the actor said in a May interview. “Fifty percent of them want him to and 50 percent of them don’t want him to. I try to play to both 50 percents.”
Mr. Burr was awarded the Emmy for best series actor in 1959 and 1961.
“Perry Mason went on the air when people were first buying television sets,” Burr said in May. “A lot of people in this country didn’t know what their legal system was all about. I’m sure just from the people who have watched the show over the years, particularly the minorities, they found out the system of justice was for them.”
Mr. Burr returned to the TV courtroom in 1985 for a two-hour movie Perry Mason. It was the highest rated TV movie that year, prompting periodic returns each season. In all, he made 26 of the Perry Mason films.
Besides his role as the murder-solving lawyer, Mr. Burr starred as the crusty, wheelchair-using San Francisco police consultant Robert T. Ironside in the NBC series Ironside, which ran from 1967 to 1975. Toward the end of his life, illness forced Mr. Burr to use a wheelchair for real.
Earlier this year, Mr. Burr returned to the Ironside role, joining his old team for a two-hour television movie The Return of Ironside, scheduled for Oct. 29. (The Mason epsiode, Case of the Killer Kiss, was scheduled to air on Oct. 22.) He appeared in more than 90 feature films, including the first Godzilla movie.
“I loved Godzilla,” said Mr. Burr, who played an American reporter in scenes inserted into the Japanese original for the U.S. release. He missed the chance for a nest egg, however.
“I tried desperately to get a piece of the action, but they wouldn’t give it to me. But I did get paid for one day’s work – more than anyone else was ever paid,” he recalled.
Raymond William Stacy Burr was born in New Westminster, British Columbia, Canada, on May 21, 1917. His parents, William Johnston Burr, a hardware dealer, and Minerva Smith Burr, a concert pianist and music teacher, divorced when he was 6. He grew up in Vallejo, Calif., where his grandfather ran a small hotel.
In later years, Mr. Burr related the family’s privations during the Depression. A junior high school dropout, he worked at many jobs: traveling salesman, store clerk, hotel manager, forest ranger, ranch hand.
A role in a church play got him interested in acting. A handsome, sturdy 6-footer, he spent a summer at a Toronto theater and was hired for a tour of England with a repertory company.
“This is the kind of guts that you have before you’re 20,” he once said. “Somebody asks you to play Macbeth, you say, ‘I’ll be ready tomorrow.’ Now I’d say, ‘Yes, but I need a year to work on it.”‘ During World War II, he served in the U.S. Navy. After his discharge, he moved to Hollywood, and in 1946 made his film debut in San Quentin. He worked steadily, from then on, often as the villain because of his formidable size and presence, resonant voice and sad, threatening eyes.
Mr. Burr suffered a series of personal tragedies in life that did not seem to break his spirit, at least publicly.
His first wife, actress Annette Sutherland, died when the plane she was in was shot down by German fighters off Portugal in 1943. Actor Leslie Howard, famous for his role in Gone with the Wind, died on the same flight.
His second marriage, to Isabella Ward, ended in divorce. His third wife, Laura Morgan, died of cancer in 1955. Two years before, his only child, Michael Evan Burr, died of leukemia at 10.
The actor devoted himself to his career and to helping American servicemen. He visited Korea 15 times during the war and toured Vietnam 13 times, not as an entertainer but as a familiar figure who talked to soldiers in outposts and hospitals.
Burr escaped from Hollywood when he wasn’t working. For several years he owned an island retreat in Fiji – “a far more civilized place than California or New York City.”In recent times he owned a 40-acre vineyard and sheep farm in California’s Sonoma Valley, where he lived with actor Robert Benevides, his longtime business associate.
Mr. Burr rarely talked publicly about his personal life. But in a Parade magazine article in 1991, he recalled: “When I knew my boy was going to die, I didn’t accept it but I knew it. I took time off for what remained of his life – one year – and we traveled all around the United States together. Before my boy left, before his time was gone, I wanted him to see the beauty of his country and its people.”
This report was supplemented with Sun-Sentinel wire services.
