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Message: [QUOTE="SWC75, post: 1099711, member: 289"] Another resume I've always like is Raymond Burr's. This is from the Perry Mason TV Show Boo and a biography of Burr by Ona Hill: "At age 13, (that would have been 1930), he was a ranch hand in Roswell new mexico. Later, he became a traveling photo salesman, a manager of a chain store, a deputy sheriff, an agent for some property his grandfather owned in China and a fire guard for the Forest Service...he starred in a church play when he was ten and haunted the smaller theaters in San Francisco in the early 30's...(he worked) in a summer theater in Toronto. A tour of Great Britain as part of a repertory company soon followed, as did a trip to Australia. later he landed a job singing in a nightclub in pre-World War II Paris." Hill says that "Raymond was the youngest MacBeth at the time to act at the famous Statford-upon-Avon Shakespeare Theatre." She also said he'd "learned a number of Chinese dialects while studying in China on his trip there. He's also learned to speak all the languages of the countries he'd visited in Europe, which he used in his singing gig in Paris. He met and befriended all the top names in jazz who were in Europe at the time. He also had an affair with a young ballerina there. When the Germans invaded, he returned to the states to study at Stanford and U Cal Berkeley "where he played baseball and swam for the Olympic Club. He finally got a degree in psychology and English literature after six years of campus and correspondence courses." The Perry Mason book explains that, while on this tour, he married an Englishwoman named Annette Sutherland and had a son, Michael. Annette was coming to meet him where he'd found work in a play in New York. Aboard the same plane was famous actor Leslie Howard, (Ashley Wilkes in "Gone With the Wind"). The plane was shot down by the Nazis and all aboard died. "Soon afterward, Burr joined the Navy and served for two years. During this stretch, he was shot in the stomach on Okinawa, receiving injuries that, over the years, required six operations. "By the age of 50 he had contracted malaria, typhoid and hepatitis." The Hill book points out that the Howard plane was on it's way from Lisbon, Portugal to London, not to New York. It says that he did counter-intelligence work in the Navy and became a Lieutenant Commander. He wound up in an Australian hospital when his ship was attacked by kamikazies. "he was seriously burned and had to be operated on six times for shrapnel in the back and shoulder. In later years, pieces of shrapnel surfaced from time to time, requiring more operations to remove them. Raymond had never elaborated on his World War II experiences and it was not well known that he received the purple heart for his injuries. he was in the navy only a short time when the incident happened, (which didn't prevent him from becoming a lieutenant commander), and stayed in the naval reserves until his discharge." The same book describes plays and films Burr was in throughout the period of the war. Burr remarried a woman named Isabella Ward who "had deep-seated personal problems". They divorced and he married his third wife Laura Andrina Marga. "Just before the couple were to take their postponed honeymoon, the learned she had cancer. She was dead in two weeks. And,a s if this wasn't enough, Burr's son from his first marriage, Michael, later died of leukemia at age 11." Burr supposedly took a year off to travel the world with Michael before he died but there is no large gaps in his credits at the time (1953) per the IMDB. Burr, in interviews always said that these events were too painful to discuss so he wasn't going to discuss his personal life. He did say that he was no longer looking for romance in his life, so that's why he didn't go out with women. The books above contain no pictures of his wives of children, or of Burr in China or Paris or on the ranch in new mexico and there are no quotes form anyone who knew him at the time. After he died, it was publicly revealed that Burr was a homosexual and that nobody know knew him had ever seen any of his wives or children, except Issabella Ward, who was real. A search of public records revealed no evidence of them and Annette Sutherland was not listed as a passenger on Leslie Howard's plane. it appeared that Burr had invented all of his tragic personal relationships as a shield to disguise his sexual preferences. The stories of his colorful world travels and heroic military service are probably equally apocryphal. Michael Beth Starr wrong a book after Burr's death called "Hiding in Plain Sight" in which he exposes these myths. he points out that the story of Michael didn't appear until after 1958 when Red Skelton famously took a year off to tour Europe with his son, who was dying of leukemia. Reading thought Burr's interviews and publicity resumes, Starr found stories about Burr living in China for five years, traveling around the world five times, being "an explorer", his family "losing their fortune" in the wall street crash, (his father was a small town hardware salesman). . In addition to studying at Stanford and Cal, Ray also attending Columbia, got a degree in English lit form McGill University in Montreal and taught at Amherst and Columbia. He "read movie scripts for a company in new York, has had a number of articles and fiction stories published by national magazines and is now engaged in writing a novel and a screenplay." He was "a football and a swimming star in his school days." Starr reports that Burr had no publicist at the time and so he made up all this stuff himself. In one interview Burr says "I went to Yucatan with some archaeologically-minded friends of mine. One day I fell in a hole and accidentally discovered some ancient Mayan ruins." Right... Every story seems to have been designed to make him more impressive or more sympathetic. Perry mason producer//director Arthur Marks said "Ray had a pathetic nature about him. He wanted people to feel a certain way about him, like feeling sorry for him. When he told the story of a wife dying in an airplane crash, that a son had died, he would get almost teary-eyed and I would saw, "Ray, you're acting now". He tried very hard to have a secret life...a lot of it was imaginative and made up, like "I have suffered and I've done this and the whole world has to put a big stamp on me like a thumbprint." It's sad that, in his time, he had to disguise his true nature. But ti's ironic that he became most famous for playing a character who made it his business to tear apart the deceptions of others. In one episode I remember, Perry Mason pounds his desk and says "I hate liars!" But to be an actor, you've got to have a talent for it. [/QUOTE]

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