Raymond Burr

In May of that year, The Return of Ironside aired, reuniting the entire original cast of the 1967-1975 series. Burr's illness precluded any further such reunions.

In 1973, Burr starred in one-hour television drama, Portrait: A Man Whose Name Was John. He portrayed Archbishop Angelo Roncalli, the future Pope John XXIII, as he tried to prevent the forced return of Jewish children from Istanbul to Nazi Germany.

Burr co-starred in such TV films as Eischied: Only The Pretty Girls Die and Disaster On The Coastliner (both 1979), The Curse of King Tut's Tomb and The Night the City Screamed (both 1980), and Peter and Paul (1981). He also had a supporting role in Dennis Hopper's controversial film Out of the Blue (1980) and spoofed his Perry Mason image in Airplane II: The Sequel (1982).

Burr reprised his 1956 role in Godzilla, King of the Monsters! in Godzilla 1985: The Legend Is Reborn. The film won Burr a nomination for a Razzie Award for Worst Supporting Actor. Burr delivered the film's closing lines: "For now, Godzilla - that strangely innocent and tragic monster - has gone to earth. Whether he returns or not, or is never again seen by human eyes, the things he has taught us remain." Read Less

Burr left Benevides his entire estate, including "all my jewelry, clothing, books, works of art, and other items of a personal nature."

Later accounts of Burr's life explain that he hid his homosexuality to protect his career. In 2000, AP reporter Bob Thomas recalled the situation:

Art Marks, a producer of Perry Mason, recalled Burr's talk of wives and children: "I know he was just putting on a show.That was my gut feeling. I think the wives and the loving women, the Natalie Wood thing, were a bit of a cover." In 2006, Dean Hargrove, who worked on Perry Mason Returns, said: "I had always assumed that Raymond was gay, because he had a relationship with Robert Benevides for a very long time. Whether or not he had relationships with women, I had no idea. I did know that I had trouble keeping track of whether he was married or not in these stories. Raymond had the ability to mythologize himself, to some extent, and some of his stories about his past tended to grow as time went by." Read Less

Burr also founded financed the American Fijian Foundation that funded academic research, including efforts to develop a dictionary of the language.

Burr made repeated trips on behalf of the United Service Organizations (USO). He toured both Korea and Vietnam during wartime and once spent six months touring Korea, Japan, and the Philippines. He sometimes organized his own troupe and toured bases both in the U.S. and overseas, often small installations that the USO did not serve, like one tour of Greenland, Baffinland, Newfoundland and Labrador. Returning from Vietnam in 1965, he made a speaking tour of the U.S. to advocate an intensified war effort. As the war became more controversial, he modified his tone, called for more attention to the sacrifice of the troops, and said, "My only position on the war is that I wish it were over." In October 1967, NBC aired Raymond Burr Visits Vietnam, a documentary of one of his visits that received mixed reviews, ranging from "The impressions he came up with are neither weighty nor particularly revealing" (Chicago Tribune) to "His questions were intelligent and elicited some interesting replies." (Los Angeles Times). Read Less

A Viacom spokesperson told the media that the illness might be related to the malignant kidney that Burr had removed that February. It was determined that the cancer had spread to his liver and was at that point inoperable. Read Less

In 1996, Raymond Burr was ranked #44 on TV Guide's 50 Greatest TV Stars of All Time.

Burr was born Raymond William Stacey Burr in New Westminster, British Columbia, Canada, to William Johnston Burr (1889–1985), an Irish hardware salesman, and his wife, Minerva (née Smith, 1892–1974), a concert pianist and music teacher, who was of English and Scottish descent. After his parents divorced, Burr moved to Vallejo, California with his mother and younger siblings, Geraldine and James Edmond. He attended a military academy for a while and graduated from Berkeley High School.

In later years Burr freely invented stories of a happy childhood. He told the Modesto Bee in 1986, for example, that when he was twelve and a half years old, his mother sent him to New Mexico for a year to work as a ranch hand. He was already his full adult height and rather large and "had fallen in with a group of college-aged kids who didn't realize how young Raymond was, and they let him tag along with them in activities and situations far too sophisticated for him to handle." He developed a passion for growing things and, while still a teenager, joined the Civilian Conservation Corps for a year. Throughout his teenage years he had some acting work, making his stage debut at age 12 with a Vancouver stock company. Read Less