The man in the witness stand fidgeted in his seat.
In front of him was a six feet tall imposing figure that looked better fit for the gridiron than the courtroom.
For the witness, it felt like the criminal defense lawyer’s brilliant piercing blue eyes were burrowing into him as he stepped closer.
The witness was in a stunned silence and swallowed hard as the lawyer came closer, followed by his booming voice that pierced the silence of the courtroom.
An uncomfortable silence followed and then…the lawyer’s fierce visage fell, and he broke into a broad smile when the room heard.
The lawyer then turned to everyone in the room and said with a chuckle “Let’s try that again, shall we?”
I’m Craig Baird and this is Canadian History Ehx!
This month we looked at actors who left their mark and, in this episode, we are following the case of television’s most distinguished and well-known defense lawyer.
This is the story of…Perry Mason…. I mean…Raymond Burr!
It’s 1859, and Joseph Burr along with his brothers Ben and Hugh, had an itch for adventure.
They were seeking their fortunes during the Cariboo Gold Rush as thousands of people were drawn to the Colony of British Columbia.
Except…Joseph had no interest in finding gold. That was hard work with no guarantee of success.
It would be much easier just to profit off the prospectors themselves.
So, when they arrived the Burr Brothers settled in New Westminster, which was the capital of the colony.
Joseph was drawn to the city named after Queen Victoria’s favourite part of London because it was a hub for the gold rush.
It was also easy for Joseph to make trips into the interior to do business with prospectors.
By 1876, Joseph met Mary Jane Johnston and the couple married soon after
The union, however, added a wrinkle in Joseph’s plan he was now a married man in need of a stable income.
Joseph took a job at the New Westminster Penitentiary, and this is where his story intersects with Canadian legend.
It is believed Joseph was the guard who escorted Slumach to the scaffold.
The elderly Katzie First Nations man hanged for murder in 1891, and I shared his story and the legend of his hidden gold in October 2025.
Well… if you believe the story, Joseph was there and then returned home to Mary.
The couple would go on to welcome four girls and two boys and one of those children was named William.
Years later, as an adult William would bump into a young woman named Minerva Smith.
The two would eventually date and then in 1914 marry.
Sadly, by July of that year the couple’s future would be threatened when first World War began and they were separated.
Thankfully the couple was reunited and by May 21, 1917, their first child was born.
Raymond William Stacy Burr entered the world tipping the scales at 12 pounds and from then on, he would struggle with his weight.
Raymond said years later,
“My grandparents pulled out the rose garden in order to plant potatoes…Everyone grew their own food. This was one of the reasons I grew up as a chubby boy, overweight for my age. I was what they call a potato boy.”
Regardless of the name calling, Raymond’s childhood was a happy one.
He was eventually joined by a sister named Geraldine in 1920 and a brother named James in 1921.
Their summers were spent camping at Boundary Bay, which sits along the United States-Canadian border.
The damp air and river fog were an escape for the young, shy boy who longed for the spotlight.
Raymond once told his mother that he wished to be a preacher, lawyer or actor.
Little did he know he would be right.
Meanwhile, the family struggled.
His father was a hardware salesman while his mother was a pianist and music teacher and neither made enough for the growing family to be able to thrive in the sluggish post-war economy.
The family might have always had food, but making ends meet was difficult.
To find a solution his parents separated, and he moved with his mother to California to live with her grandparents, who owned a small hotel outside of San Francisco.
His father joined them soon after, but he never fully acclimated to their new home.
Eight months later he returned to Canada and although there was no official divorce, yet the writing was on the wall.
William and Minerva’s marriage was over.
As his family life fell apart, Raymond found solace in food.
It would be his favorite coping mechanism but to control his weight and to give him structure, Minerva sent Raymond to San Rafael Military Academy.
Today, it is known as Marin Academy, and it is one of the most competitive private high schools in the Bay Area.
But back when Raymond attended when he was 11 it was a nightmare for him.
He was constantly teased and bullied because his uniform was too small for him.
This was made worse when the school refused to let him ride a horse because of his weight. He said,
“When you’re a fat little boy in a public school, or any kind of school, you’re just persecuted something awful.”
He took solace from the torment in the school’s gardens.
Far away from the constant torment he would stroll the edge of the campus and slowly fall in love with flowers.
It would be a lifelong affair.
He spent so much time in the garden that the woman who managed it always ensured the gate was left open for him.
After a hellish year at the school Raymond returned home.
He entered junior high school and by then he had a second love.
Acting.
He participated in various small theater productions and caught the bug.
He then hit puberty and shot up to six feet tall with a deep booming voice so the roles he was interested in changed.
Once he graduated high school he dove headfirst into performing.
First, he joined a Toronto theater company in 1934 which allowed him to perform across Canada.
He also lent his golden voice to radio and then became a singer.
All three allowed Raymond Burr to be a working performer.
In fact, he did so well that by 1937 he was back in California where he joined the Pasadena Playhouse.
Founded in Pasadena, California in 1912, the playhouse quickly became one of the most important small, local theatres in the western United States.
Playwright George Bernard Shaw called it The Athens of the West.
It’s where many future stars took their first steps into professional acting including Charles Bronson, Gene Hackman, Dustin Hoffman, and Raymond Burr.
His time with the playhouse was transformative as theater staged a play every month, so he not only learned the ins and outs of acting but also forced him to memorize pages and pages and pages of lines every few weeks.
To make ends meet he worked as a waiter at a restaurant in Hollywood.
While serving one day, he tripped and stumbled with a customer who refused to move her feet out of the way.
An argument ensued, but in the friction something else sparked… interest.
The two quickly realized that they had a lot in common and as they say in the movies…
It was the start of a beautiful friendship.
Hedda Hopper, was one of the most powerful gossip columnists in the United States.
Something Raymond didn’t know when he picked a fight.
The friendship would become very beneficial to his future because Hedda knew what secrets to keep.
And Raymond had one he hadn’t shared with many people.
Usually when I research an episode, I read a couple books about the subject.
One of the best sources of information I had was Hiding in Plain Sight: The Secret Life of Raymond Burr by Michael Seth Starr.
Then I dove into sources like the Macleans Archive and newspaper archives, where I can find about his life.
What made this story challenging was that Raymond Burr is, well, he didn’t always tell the truth.
For example, after he became famous, Raymond said he served in the Second World War and earned the Purple Heart when he was shot in the stomach at Okinawa.
Other times he said he received the medal when he was injured on a battleship by kamikaze pilots diving their planes into it.
He also made up an entire family.
Raymond once said he had married a woman named Annette Sutherland in the early-1940s and together they had one son, named Michael Evan who sadly died in 1953 at ten years old from leukemia.
In one version of the story, he had taken Michael on a trip around the world a year prior to his death. His wife Annette also met a tragic end.
She died the same year Michael was born, in a plane crash.
For added flair, the plane was shot down by the Nazis over the Bay of Biscay.
As you can imagine…None of this was true.
There are no records of Raymond ever serving in the military.
In fact, if you look you can find him performing in the United States throughout the war.
As for Michael and Annette?
His family and friends never attended a wedding, let alone see a child.
His parents never mentioned having a grandchild either.
All of this could be chalked up to a bit of poetic flair by a gifted actor, but I believe there is something more to it.
If you were gay, you had to make sure no one knew your sexual orientation.
Raymond’s contemporary, Montgomery Clift, was a four-time Academy Award nominee, and is known to be one of the greatest actors of all time.
In 1966, he died suddenly of a heart attack at the age of forty-five. It wasn’t until 2000, when his close friend Elizabeth Taylor made the first public declaration that Clift was gay.
Rock Hudson was another Oscar-nominated actor who hid his sexuality his entire life. It wasn’t until 1985, as he was dying of AIDS, that he began to speak about being gay.
For Raymond, the fibs and stories he told probably were a way to shield his personal life. Saying that he was a widower that had also lost a child prevented any follow up questions about his love interests and more importantly… his sexuality.
This could also be said for his stories about war time heroics.
In the minds of many at the time, there was no way a decorated soldiers who put his body on the line in the name of freedom and liberty could be anything but straight.
This is also where his very good friend Hedda Hopper came in handy.
She knew how to bury a story and kept his sexuality from making it to a wider audience.
Which is a good thing because by now Raymond had years of experience on stage, including Broadway, and soon he would make his debut on the silver screen.
His first film role came in 1940, when he was an uncredited chauffeur in Earl of Puddlestone, a comedy starring James Gleason
He would finally be credited six years later in the 1946 romantic drama San Quentin starring Lawrence Tierney, Barton MacLane and Marian Carr.
The movie follows the warden of San Quentin State Prison as he takes three of his best-behaved model prisoners to a press event in San Francisco, but then one of them escapes enroute.
The warden enlists one of the prisoner’s former enemies, and his henchmen, played by Raymond to bring him back to justice.
Because of his imposing size and deep voice Raymond would go on to be typecast as the muscle.
He may not have been the dashing lead, but the villainous roles kept him busy and well fed.
In 1947 he was the main villain, a corrupt, land-grabbing saloon owner, in the 1947 RKO Western film Code of the West.
That year he was also a gangster trying to coerce truck driver Steve into shipping stolen goods in the film noir titled Desperate.
This began a string of appearances in film as both reprehensible and pathetic characters and became a prototype of film noir,
Raymond knew what directors looked for with him and he was happy to provide, these roles also helped hide his sexuality.
So did finally getting married.
He met Isabella Ward at the Pasadena Playhouse and the two got married on Jan. 10, 1948, at her sister’s house.
The couple did not have a honeymoon and went to live in Raymond’s apartment in Hollywood.
Knowing what you know about Raymond, you can imagine that their union was not a happy one and the couple separated after a year and officially divorced in 1954.
Raymond and Isabella never saw each other again, and neither one of them remarried for the rest of their lives but just as the ink dried on their divorce, Raymond landed his biggest role to date.
He became Lars Thorwald in Rear Window.
Directed by Alfred Hitchcock, the mystery thriller follows photojournalist Jeff Jefferies, played by Jimmy Stewart, who is confined to his New York City apartment after breaking his leg on assignment.
From his wheelchair Jefferies starts to watch his neighbours through open windows.
In one apartment, he finds Lars Thorwald with his bedridden and domineering wife.
One day, the wife disappears and Jefferies suspects Lars killed her.
It premiered in August 1954 to rave reviews and became one of the top grossing movies that year and went on to be nominated for four Academy Awards.
Even if you aren’t familiar with the movie, I’m sure you have seen The Simpsons parody of it in the season six-episode Bart of Darkness.
As for Raymond, once the final climatic scene was projected onto the silver screen he was thrust into the spotlight.
He was praised for his performance by both critics and audiences alike.
Now he was fielding offers on several projects; except he was still being typecast as a villain.
Hoping to spread his wings so audiences could see him as something else he agreed to a very intriguing project.
It had originated in Japan and in this role, Raymond would finally have a co-star that was bigger and more menacing than him.
Just as Raymond was being lauded for his performance in Rear Window in Japan, Godzilla debuted to an audience hungry to heal from its collective trauma.
Nine years after the Second World War ended, as Japan reeled from the impact of the two atomic bombs dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima, the film served as an allegory for nuclear proliferation.
Tokyo’s destruction by a radiation-fueled monster reflected what happens when science is misused amid environmental destruction by humans.
The film was a massive success and a year after its release; producer Edmund Goldman purchased the film.
To make the 1954 Japanese film more palatable and accessible to American audiences, the studio recut the movie and inserted Raymond Burr as a foreign correspondent reporting on the destruction of Tokyo.
His character, Steve Martin, is seamlessly stitched into the original Japanese footage.
The new scenes were shot at the Visual Drama Inc. soundstage and sets from the film were recreated as Raymond is often seen reacting to the monster through windows, filing reports, or standing in the background with stand-in doubles to make it appear as though he was interacting with the original Japanese cast.
Raymond filmed his scenes over the course of six days and was paid $10,000, about $125,000 today. Although true to his embellishing nature, he said he filmed the scenes in one day and worked 24 hours straight.
The same year that he played a good guy in Godzilla, Raymond appeared in Please Murder Me!
This was another film noir, but in it he plays Craig Carlson, a lawyer who successfully secures an acquittal for Myra Leeds played by Angela Lansbury.
Soon after he learns she had manipulated him and actually committed the murder but cannot be tried again so he devises a complex plan to bring her to justice by arranging for her to kill him The film wasn’t successful, but it served as a warm up for a courtroom role that would make Raymond very rich and famous because the same year that Please Murder Me! was released CBS announced that they would be bringing a best-selling book to the screen.
Perry Mason.
The world was first introduced to Perry Mason in the 1933 book titled The Case of the Velvet Claws.
Written by Erie Stanley Gardner, it followed the sharp-minded defense attorney and establishes Masons’ reputation as a brilliant, fearless lawyer who thrives on unraveling complex and morally tangled cases. From 1933 to 1973, Gardner wrote 1.2 million words a year and produced dozens of Perry Mason novels. With over 300 million copies sold, Perry Mason ranks behind only Goosebumps and Harry Potter for best-selling book series worldwide.
With the popularity of the books came adaptations. From 1933 to 1937, five Perry Mason movies were released. This was followed by a successful radio series.
Then in 1956, CBS made their announcement and fans eagerly awaited to who would be playing the famous lawyer.
While his physical attributes were never covered in the books, producers saw him as tall, thin, and handsome.
Hundreds of actors auditioned for the role, but none fit what they were looking for Around this time, Raymond wasn’t having much luck in TV either.
He was passed over for the role of Marshal Matt Dillon on Gunsmoke, so he wasn’t even on producer’s radars for Perry Mason.
Raymond wanted the role, but he knew that at 300 pounds there was no way he would be cast.
So, he decided to drop weight and audition.
He went on a crash diet of cottage cheese, fruit, and cigarettes and lost 30 pounds, which gave him a chiseled face to go along with his piercing blue eyes.
When his agent contacted the Perry Mason producers, they said he could audition for Hamilton Burger, the lawyer who always lost to Mason.
Raymond agreed but only if he could audition for Mason as well.
The story of what happened next has changed many times over.
In one version, author Erle Gardner was in the projector room when Raymond walked in and he leapt up and shouted, “That is Perry Mason!”
In another version, Gardner was walking through the studio when he saw Raymond auditioning for some random role on another show and immediately told producers to cast him.
In yet another version, after the audition, Gardner told Raymond that in 20 minutes he captured Perry Mason better than he did writing him for 20 years.
However it happened, Raymond got the part and signed a three-year contract with an option for two more years.
In April 1957, the filming began on the 39-episode series which would begin airing in October of that year. While it took until season two for things to really get going Perry Mason quickly became one of the biggest shows on television. I
From 1957 to 1966, 30 million viewers tuned in every week to watch Perry Mason outwit others with the expectation that he would never lose.
But in fact, lost three cases over 271 episodes but all three were deemed mistrials off-air.
The show made Raymond Burr popular and famous, and it is believed he received 3,000 fan letters a week.
He also received three consecutive Emmy Award nominations and won the award in 1959 and 1961 for his performance.
But all that success came at a cost.
As the lead, he appeared in nearly every scene, which meant he slept at the studio and woke up at 3:30 a.m. to go over the script.
He averaged about four hours of sleep and rarely had weekends off.
To make things easier the studio provided him with a three-room bungalow on the lot.
This grueling schedule also forced him to eventually lose 100 pounds.
Raymond said he simply did not have time to eat; except for the dinners he organized for the cast and crew.
In his massive kitchen at home, he made huge feasts for everyone on the show who were like family to him.
When Irving Pringle, who was responsible for makeup on the show, collapsed from an ulcer, Raymond took him to the hospital personally and stayed with him all night.
He also expanded the Perry Mason family when he heard that George Stone, a fellow actor, had gone was blind and was unable to find work,
Raymond hired Stone to be the court clerk, which meant all he had to do was sit in a chair during courtroom scenes to collect a steady paycheque.
He also used his fame and fortune for good.
He gave money to anyone who asked, whether it was friends, strangers, or charities.
He sponsored children living in impoverished countries and he often showed pictures of them to friends and fans like a proud father.
One day on set, he was told about a young girl who was burned in a fire. She told the press as she recovered that she hoped to get an autographed photo of Perry Mason, but Raymond did her one better. He flew to visit her personally in the hospital as she recovered and when reporters showed up, he told them to get out of the room, and he refused to let them take a picture of the private moment between them.
By the end of the 1961-62 season, Perry Mason had reached its peak and soon the show began to decline in ratings.
For its first five seasons it had aired on Saturday and easily defeated all other shows but then in 1962 it moved to the more competitive Thursday night.
By then there had also been a cultural shift.
Most shows were in colour while Perry Mason was still being shot in black and white.
Plus, fans were beginning to tire with the lawyer who never missed a case.
They knew what they were getting when they tuned in.
As ratings dipped, CBS moved the show again in 1965.
This time to Sunday night where it was up against the powerhouse Bonanza which caused the ratings to plummet.
Raymond had wanted to leave the show after the fifth season but had been convinced to stay for another four seasons.
The dump truck full of money producers offered him certainly helped.
Even with the ratings lagging, everyone still expected the show to return for a tenth season.
The plan was to shoot it in colour and Raymond signed on for one last dance.
A few days after he agreed, he opened the paper to find that Perry Mason had been cancelled.
Quote
“I would have thought that any one of them would have had the decency to just pick up the phone and say ‘We came out, we persuaded you, but we have now reconsidered and it is not a good idea’, and I would have said ‘Wonderful!’”.
After nine years as Perry Mason, Raymond Burr was now free to leave the courtroom behind.
But he would be taking something very precious with him.
Robert Benevides.
The two had met when the young man delivered a Perry Mason script to Raymond.
Soon they developed a connection and before long Robert was a regular on set.
Most assumed Robert was Raymond’s friend, or his assistant.
No one suspected the truth.
Robert and Raymond were a couple in love.
And once Perry Mason was cancelled the two moved into an 80-year-old home on the island of Naitauba.
Raymond had found the 4000-acre island on a previous trip to Fiji and the couple quickly made it their home and oasis away from the prying eyes of Hollywood. The only way to communicate was through a two-way radio. There were no phones, and no television.
The couple settled into their life of isolation while Raymond financed the construction of an entire hospital, established a newspaper, and brought electricity to the island.
He also paid for several children to be educated in the United States. Raymond, however, refused to build an airstrip on the island so any visitors to his home had to take a boat for the last part of the journey.
That meant the couple rarely had visitors from back home as the entire trip took 22 hours.
It was a beautiful place to live, but Raymond needed to find ways to keep funding his island project.
He was known as Perry Mason, which made movie roles few and far between.
His only hope was television.
And he would find it in Robert T. Ironside.
A year after Perry Mason was canceled, Raymond moved from CBS to Universal Studios, to play the title role in the television drama Ironside.
In the pilot episode, San Francisco Chief of Detectives Robert T. Ironside is paralyzed by a sniper during an attempt on his life and, after his recovery, uses a wheelchair for mobility, and he becomes a consultant for the police department with his own staff to aid him in investigations.
Raymond had been immediately intrigued by the role, and the prospect of playing a protagonist who was not defined by his disability. A cool jazz intro by Quincy Jones signaled the beginning of the two-hour television movie that premiered on March 28, 1967, and served as the pilot for Ironside.
The ratings were high and once again, Raymond was back as a TV regular.
That meant getting up at 4 a.m. again and shooting through the day before going to his home on the studio lot to sleep.
While the schedule was just as grueling as before, there was one key difference.
He now spent most of his time on set sitting in a wheelchair.
Raymond’s weight began to climb and before long, he was pushing 300 pounds.
And because of his notoriety and influence it meant he could throw his weight around.
Early in the first season, he told producers that he was not going to film outdoors anymore.
He argued that because he was in a wheelchair, he often had to look up at the sun, and it was too difficult.
Producers had little choice but to comply and used stand-ins for those shots.
Things might’ve been different if the show hadn’t been such a success.
In its first season, the show was 26th in the ratings; that would only grow because by 1971, it was fourth overall with 26 million viewers each week.
People tuned in to find out how Ironside was going to use his intelligence and cunning to catch criminals.
Along the way they were introduced to Harrison Ford in 1967, Martin Sheen in 1970 and Jodie Foster in 1972. All of which were guest stars on Ironside. Like with Perry Mason though, by the seventh season, ratings began to decline just as Raymond’s health did.
While on a summer hiatus, Raymond and Robert were on a plane heading to the Azores when Raymond felt a chest pain right before takeoff.
Well over 300 pounds by this point, both pilots had to carry him out of the plane and to an awaiting ambulance.
He was examined, and doctors told him that he was lucky to be alive because he had had a heart attack.
He remained in hospital for two weeks before he was scheduled to returned to work.
On set, Raymond complained that he was under doctor’s orders to work only half days.
He also criticized the declining quality of the scripts and even fired a director halfway through an episode.
More bad news came in January 1974 when his mother passed away, and Raymond had to be sedated for three days to deal with the grief.
But the hits just kept on coming.
Just a few months later in October, Raymond was back in the hospital to have his gallbladder removed.
Once he returned to set, he got the news that Ironside had been cancelled.
The final episode aired on Jan. 16, 1975.
During its run, the show won two Emmys while Raymond picked up six Emmy nominations and two Golden Globe nominations.
By the time it came to an end Raymond was happy to be done with the show, saying he hated the wheelchair and the back trouble it gave him.
He was also happy that the show was quickly syndicated which meant Raymond earned a tidy $1.5 million in the process.
It seemed that television was behind him.
Raymond was now free to return to his first love.
Flowers….
Orchids to be exact.
He had greenhouses in both Hollywood and Naitauba, where he developed Sea God Nurseries with Robert.
The business sent flowers to buyers around the world, through a service Raymond created called Teleflora.
Raymond said
“Flowers are my passion. I believe that by enabling people to send flowers instantly by telephone, we’re helping the country, I hope aesthetically and culturally.”
Sea God Nurseries eventually added more than 1,500 orchids to the world catalogue.
And Teleflora made an already rich man, even richer.
But acting beckoned him once more and in 1977, he debuted in his third series.
Kingston: Confidential where he played R.B. Kingston, a rich media magnate who solved crimes with his employees.
It lasted only 13 episodes.
He then tried his hand on another show, titled Jordan Chance which premiered in 1978 but didn’t make it past the pilot.
Raymond then spent the next few years in guest roles on various shows including The Love Boat and The Misadventures of Sheriff Lobo.
By then his health was in decline as his weight increased and due to growing medical concerns, he had to sell his beloved remote Fiji property in 1983.
But…just when everyone thought that Raymond’s acting career had officially fizzled out, and he would be destined to obscurity.
Two former characters suddenly popped back up.
Nostalgia is a powerful thing.
People love to remember the past, through rose-coloured glasses as a sign of a simpler time.
For much of the early-1980s, Raymond didn’t have much luck getting roles in television or films.
His best days were behind him.
But much like Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard, no matter how rich Raymond it was hard letting go of the fame.
By 1985, it had been almost 20 years since Perry Mason had gone off air.
But sensing an opportunity, producers Dean Hargrove and Fred Silverman approached Raymond with an offer he would find very difficult to refuse.
A Perry Mason television movie.
Raymond said he would do the movie, but only if his long-time friend and former co-star Barbara Hale also returned.
The rest of the cast had unfortunately died by then.
When Barbara said she would do it, Raymond agreed to step into the courtroom again.
With a budget of $3 million, Perry Mason Returns was filmed in Toronto through the spring of 1985.
In the film, Mason had resigned from his position as a judge to defend his private secretary, Della Street, on a murder charge.
Rumblings of a new Perry Mason television movie, spread and interest skyrocketed.
The Globe and Mail featured a two-page spread about the show, as it was the talk of the town.
Perry Mason Returns debuted in a two-night event on Dec. 1 and 2, 1985.
In the United States, it was the highest rated television movie of the year with 27 million viewers.
In Canada, it had the misfortune of airing on the same days as CBC’s iconic Anne of Green Gables miniseries which became the highest rated program of any genre.
As the public clamored for more Perry Mason, Raymond would have a regular paycheque as 26 films were slated to be filmed between 1985 and 1993.
And just as Perry Mason returned to television screens, another blast from the past suddenly popped up in Raymond’s life.
The very same week that he was asked to return as Perry Mason, he received a phone call from American producers who had obtained the rights to the Godzilla film, Return of Godzilla, for distribution in the United States.
History repeated itself as the Japanese film was re-edited for American audiences and produced wanted Raymond to reprise his role of reporter, Steve Martin.
Although in the film his character was only referred to as Mr. Martin.
In the 30 years since Raymond first played the role, another guy named Steve Martin became very famous and producers worried about confusing audiences.
Raymond was more than happy to reprise his role, but he had demands.
Although filming the new scenes was supposed to take three days Raymond agreed to work one, eight hour day.
He also refused to memorize lines, and asked for teleprompters, while demanding that the movie have a serious tone.
When Godzilla 1985 debuted Aug. 23, 1985, it was panned by critics, and Raymond received a Golden Raspberry Award nomination for Worst Supporting Actor.
The reviews may have stunk, but the film grossed $4 million during its theatrical run and added $8 million in video rentals and sales, all on a $2 million budget.
While Raymond was riding a resurgence, his health couldn’t keep up.
In 1991, while filming the Perry Mason film The Case of the Glass Coffin, he had severe pain in his stomach/
t. After a series of tests, he was diagnosed with colon cancer.
And if you think that slowed him down.
It didn’t.
He had surgery and was back on set within weeks.
But the cancer was not gone and a few months later doctors discovered it had spread to his spine.
By December 1991 it was in his kidney.
Doctors recommended an immediate operation, but Raymond refused because he was about to start filming the first Ironside television movie and he had put aside the earnings from that film for various charities.
He did not want to rob them of a significant donation.
He didn’t tell anyone on set that he was going through chemotherapy.
Once filming was complete, he went in for surgery.
On Feb. 1, 1993, he had his kidney removed but after several weeks of recovery, he got the news he was dreading.
The cancer had spread and was now inoperable.
Raymond knew his time was coming to an end and rather than sit on his laurels he continued to work.
For audiences first on the screen was The Return of Ironside which aired on May 4, 1993, and did well in the ratings.
Two months later, Raymond was filming the next Perry Mason television movie, The Case of the Killer Kiss.
But by now there was no hiding his illness as his weight had plummeted and he could barely stand so he filmed his scenes in a wheelchair.
When filming ended, Raymond said goodbye to Barbara Hale, she replied.
“Have a good trip, honey.”
It was the last time they saw each other.
Raymond spent his final days at home with the man he loved.
He refused phone calls from friends and spent his time sitting in his beautiful yard on his vast property.
By August, the cancer had reached his brain, but Raymond refused morphine, as he wanted to be lucid for as long as possible.
He wanted to hold on to be able to enjoy the first bottle of wine produced by his winery.
When a TV Guide reporter interviewed him through Robert and asked him what he had learned
He answered
“Nothing. Except that death is ugly and messy and not one whit romantic.”
By September, the pain was too much, and he was hooked to a morphine drip.
Then on Sept. 10, 1993, Raymond woke up suddenly and said that if he lied down again, he would die.
He spent the next 30 hours sitting upright.
By Sept. 12, his condition had improved and he asked Robert about the vineyard and the state of his orchids, but the pain soon returned.
At 5 p.m., Raymond fell into a coma.
Less than four hours later, Raymond Burr died with Robert at his side,
Since then, Raymond has been recognized for his role in shaping TV history.
In 1996, he was named one of the greatest TV stars by TV Guide.
That same year, a garden at the Bailey-Matthews National Shell Museum in Florida was named AFTER him.
In 2008, Canada Post issued a stamp in his honour, and a year later he was inducted into Canada’s Walk of Fame.
And he continues to be discovered by new viewers.
In 2014, The Atlantic analyzed 77,000 different personalized genres on Netflix and found that Raymond their users’ favourite actor.
But did you know that along with Perry Mason and Ironside, he had an important part to play in another iconic television show?
When I was home alone as a kid, I watched a show that scared the living hell out of me.
Even today, when I hear the theme music, I get chills and I become a10-year-old in front of the TV.
Unsolved Mysteries scared a generation and although most associated it with Robert Stack, who hosted it from 1988 to 2002.
He wasn’t the original host.
That honour goes to Raymond Burr.
On Jan. 20, 1987, he hosted the very first television special. It got seventeen million viewers, and spawned future specials which eventually became l series we know.
Unfortunately, Raymond’s was too expensive to keep as host he was replaced by Karl Malden for the second special.
By September 1987, Robert Stack became the host, but it may never have existed had it not been for….
Raymond Burr.
*sources*
- Hiding in Plain Sight: The Secret Life of Raymond Burr by Michael Starr
- IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000994/
- Canadian Encyclopedia: https://thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/raymond-burr
- Canada Post: https://www.canadapost-postescanada.ca/cpo/mr/assets/pdf/pressreleases/raymond_burr-e.pdf
- Canada’s Walk of Fame: https://www.canadaswalkoffame.com/inductees/raymond-burr/
- Global News: https://globalnews.ca/news/77562/raymond-burr/
