Background
Burr, Raymond was born on May 21, 1917 in New Westminster, Canada.
Burr, Raymond was born on May 21, 1917 in New Westminster, Canada.
Educated at the universities of Stanford, California, and Columbia.
He was director of the Pasadena Community Playhouse and an experienced stage actor before making his screen debut in San Quentin (46, Gordon Douglas). His bulk was invested with every degree of villainy, from the robust to the perverted. To add to his size, his sad features were always ready to sink into grave jowls and puffy malice.
Burr worked hard and this list mentions only his best- remembered parts: Desperate (47, Anthony Mann); Pitfall (48, Andre de Toth); Ruthless (48, Edgar G. Ulmer); Sleep, My Love (48, Douglas Sil k); Raw Deal (48, Mann); Walk a Crooked Mile (48, Douglas); Bride of Vengeance (49, Mitchell Leisen); Abandoned (49, Joseph M. Newman); The Adventures of Don Juan (49, Vincent Sherman); Foii Algiers (50, Lesley Selander); Key to the City (50, George Sidney); His Kind of Woman (51, John Farrow); New Mexico (51, Irving Reis); M (51, Joseph Losey); Meet Danny Wilson (51, Joseph Pevney); as the hostile, limping district attorney in A Place in the Sun (51, George Stevens); Horizons West (52, Budd Boettieher); The Blue Gardenia (53, Fritz Lang); Passion (54, Allan Dwan); Gorilla at Large (54, Harmon Jones); Godzilla (55, Inoshiro Honda); Count Th ree and Pray (55, George Sherman); A Man Alone (55. Ray Milland); Great Day in the Morning (56, Jacques Tourneur); The Brass Legend (56, Gerd Oswald); A Cry in the Night (56, Frank Tuttle); Ciime of Passion (57, Oswald); and Affair in Havana (57. Laslo Benedek).
Having incurred so much audience hostility, how Hitchcockian it is that in Rear Window (54)—as the killer across the courtyard—he should finally confront us, so troubled that he wins our sympathy. In the cin¬ema, Burr’s mold had been cast and, no matter how many times he might fill it, it could not be remade. Astutely, he moved into TV, and two great successes: first as Perry Mason, an attorney triumphant from 1957 to 1966 and then, as if all that pacing round witnesses had tired him, as Ironside, a wheelchair detective. Perhaps that posture gave him pleasant memories of James Stewart in Rear Window.
He had no need to make films and only appeared twice in a decade: New Face in Hell (67, John Guillermin) and Tomorrow Never Comes (77, Peter Collinson). But in the eighties, he was back on TV as Pern Mason again, and he did a few more movies: Out of the Bine (80, Dennis Hopper); The Return (81, Greydon Clark); Airplane II: The Sequel (82, Ken Finkleman); and Godzilla 1985 (85, Kohji Hashimoto and R. J. kizer).