{"id":9024,"date":"2017-05-21T15:33:37","date_gmt":"2017-05-21T15:33:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/?p=9024"},"modified":"2017-06-20T13:22:33","modified_gmt":"2017-06-20T13:22:33","slug":"tvs-perry-mason-raymond-burr-was-someone-to-count-on","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/?p=9024","title":{"rendered":"TV\u2019s \u2018Perry Mason\u2019, Raymond Burr was someone to count on"},"content":{"rendered":"

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By Ray Bennett<\/p>\n

LONDON \u2013 Anyone who recalls \u201cPerry Mason\u201d or \u201cIronside\u201d will recall Raymond Burr, who was born 100 years ago today. He was one of the biggest stars on television from the Fifties through to the Nineties \u2026 in more ways than one.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen I was born, I was called a \u2018potato baby\u2019. I weighed 12 and a quarter pounds. Weight has been a problem all my life,\u201d he told me in 1986. \u201cI was born during the famine right after World War I. Canada was really hit very hard because they sent everything they had to England.\u00a0 It devastated the country. All the rose bushes were dug up and people planted potatoes. You lived on potatoes, macaroni and rice. Starch, all starch.\u201d<\/p>\n

Many of us who are not stick figures admired the way that Burr carried his girth so handsomely. Others were not always so agreeable. \u201cIt completely destroys people when I get too heavy,\u201d he says. \u201cBut my blood pressure is the same as when I was 20 and I can still get up a hill faster than most people. I\u2019m beginning to take it off, though. I\u2019ve lost about 30 pounds and it takes a lot before it shows on me. It\u2019s never been a consideration. Whatever I weighed, that was what I weighed.\u201d<\/p>\n

Burr, who died in 1993, was a world traveler, a gardener, a gourmet, and a philanthropist. He was a wine expert, an authority on forestry, a grower of orchids, and principal owner of a newspaper. He also was one of the most recognisable actors in the world.<\/p>\n

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His two long-running series, \u201cPerry Mason\u201d and \u201cIronside\u201d were immensely popular and he made 30 Perry Mason TV-movies between 1985 and 1995. They were re made in Canada for the cost benefits the Canadian dollar allowed but there was a much deeper connection for Burr. He was born there, in New Westminster, British Columbia, and although he moved to the United States when he was six, the time and place of his birth had a profound impact on the man he would become.<\/p>\n

As a result of playing commanding screen characters for so many years, Burr found that he was expected to be just as capable offscreen. \u201cPeople expect a great deal of me,\u201d he said. It is a measure of Burr\u2019s strength as an actor that a lifetime of sometimes harsh experience was captured in his expressive countenance and emerged as something that people wanted to lean on.\u201d<\/p>\n

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His mother, Minerva Smith Burr, was a celebrated concert pianist locally. She would play the huge Wurlitzer pipe organ with the San Francisco Symphony every Christmas. The little attic apartment was the scene of many parties with the great composers, musicians and opera stars who visited San Francisco in attendance. Young Burr dreamed of of a musical career for himself. \u201cI wanted to study with my mother because she was the best teacher but I never pushed her because I\u2019d hear her working still at 8 o\u2019clock at night, teaching somebody, and I thought, hell, let her have her time off.\u201d<\/p>\n

After breaking into theatre in New York and finding success on radio he became a busy film actor, usually playing cops or villains in movies such as \u201cRear Window\u201d (1954, above), \u201cA Cry in the Night\u201d (1956) and \u201cBride of the Gorilla\u201d (pictured below with Barbara Payton, 1951)<\/p>\n

When \u201cPerry Mason\u201d came along in 1957, Burr immersed himself in the show. In those days, each series had 39 episodes a season. As the title character, Burr was in almost every scene. He lived at the studio. \u201cFortunately, I was not married and I wasn\u2019t a parent,\u201d he says bluntly. \u201cI would have been the worst parent in the world and I would been unmarried very shortly. I lived in the studio six days a week for nine years. I wanted to take out ads in the Hollywood trades to warn actors:\u00a0 \u201cIf you\u2019re the name of the show, don\u2019t do it. You\u2019ll kill yourself.\u2019 It depends on your family, your love life, your hopes for a life that is fairly well balanced. If you have no need of any of those things then go ahead and do the television show. But if you need those things, you should not do the show. Ever. Because if you have a family, you will break it apart. Or, you will not have a successful television show. One or the other. It cannot be both ways.\u201d<\/p>\n

Still, after nine years as Perry Mason, Burr stepped back into another title role one year later in \u201cIronside\u201d, which ran from 1967 to 1975. This time, he also was a co-producer and he made sure his co-stars (Dan Galloway and Barbara Anderson) saw plenty of action. He never spent a night at the studio. He did, however, have to change some things. \u201cWhen I saw the first script, I thought it was a dreadful idea,\u201d he said. \u201cIt was a sort of cross between \u2018Batman\u2019 and something. Ironside had a van with a complete forensic laboratory that you could solve any crime from. He had a wheelchair with weapons in the arms. It took a while to get it around to being a good human story.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the years after \u201cIronside\u201d, Burr had one short-lived series (\u201cKingston\u201d in 1977), made seven movies, 10 TV specials and toured England on the stage. \u201cI have not stopped working at any time,\u201d he said. He turned down the notion of remaking \u201cPerry Mason\u201d for many years because it was always suggested as a new hour-long weekly series. \u201cI had no interest in doing another weekly show,\u201d he said. \u201cBut I said I would the show anytime if it were feature-length. Fred Silverman and Dean Hargrove came up with the the plan of doing an occasional series of TV movies, and I said as long as they got Barbara Hale (who played Mason\u2019s secretary Della Street in the original show, pictured top), then I\u2019d do them.\u201d<\/p>\n

Burr was pleased that the 2-hour movies left room for some of the humour, an element that the original series sadly lacked. \u201cEarle Stanley Gardner [who wrote the Mason novels] and his wife both had great senses of humour but our producers did not so you saw very little humour from Mason at all,\u201d he said. \u201cThis time, I imagine you will see more humour with each succeeding show.\u201d<\/p>\n

His great sorrowful eyes crinkled merrily: \u201cPeople forget that my first Broadway show was a musical. I sang and danced and said funny things. Shakespeare isn\u2019t all \u2018Macbeth\u2019. Shakespeare is the Fool, too.\u201d<\/p>\n

Even with a smile on his face, Raymond Burr looked like a man you could count on.<\/p>\n

A version of this story appeared in Satellite Orbit magazine.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Ray Bennett LONDON \u2013 Anyone who recalls \u201cPerry Mason\u201d or \u201cIronside\u201d will recall Raymond Burr, who was born 100 years ago today. He was one of the biggest stars on television from the Fifties through to the Nineties \u2026 … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,1263],"tags":[4606,4605,4604],"class_list":["post-9024","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-film","category-memory-lane","tag-ironside","tag-perry-mason","tag-raymond-burr"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9024","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9024"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9024\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9085,"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9024\/revisions\/9085"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9024"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9024"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9024"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}