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Nor can they recall Burr talking about either him or her at the time. Furthermore, flight records show that there were only three adult women aboard the plane that carried Leslie Howard when it was shot down by Nazi forces. According to the flight records, Annette Southerland was not among them.

Burr spoke of two subsequent wives. Public record verifies a 1947 marriage to Isabella Ward that was annulled several months later. However, there is no verification for the actor’s assertion that he married Laura Adrina Morgan in 1953, remaining her husband Laura’s 1955 death.

It’s quite possible, probable even, that Burr, facing pressure as a rising star in the homophobic Hollywood firmament, invented a tragic tale of double widow-hood, and a dead child, in order to conceal his sexual orientation. Such fabrications were common in Hollywood, although they were more commonly confined to fictitious girlfriends and fiancées, not spouses and children.

What is known for certain is that Burr proved his acting chops and earned a good living playing one movie villain after another in post war films such as Raw Deal, Ruthless, and Sleep My Lovely. Usually as a villain, he was also a popular guest star on TV dramas of the day.

In 1954, he was acclaimed for playing the menacing, silver-haired wife-killer Lars Thorwald in Alfred Hitchcock’s classic Rear Window. Two years later, the rotund actor battled a co-star whose size dwarfed his own: Godzilla: King of the Monsters, the very first of the Godzilla pictures.

In 1956, Raymond Burr went to audition for the role of district attorney Hamilton Burger in CBS’s Perry Mason series. At the audition, he also read for the title role. Perry Mason creator Erle Stanley Gardner witnessed the reading and exclaimed “He’s Perry Mason.”

The CBS drama was an immediate and huge success when it premiered on September 21, 1957. Suddenly, Raymond Burr was a big star and one of television’s highest paid actors. He was also one of its most generous.

Throughout the next four decades, much of his TV fortune supported a philanthropic lifestyle. Among many other things, Burr was famous for opening his home and wallet to out of work actors. He supported more than twenty foster children, worldwide.

Without publicity, and on his own dime, the actor made countless trips to Korea and Vietnam. He didn’t go to perform, or to pose for photographers. Burr went to support and speak with our soldiers serving on the front line.

Because of Perry Mason’s phenomenal popularity, he was so closely associated with American jurisprudence that he often spoke at legal conventions, and he was awarded an honorary law doctorate from the McGeorge School of Law in Sacramento, California.

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