The couple co-starred in Burr’s first Playhouse production, Quiet Wedding, and were married on January 10, 1948, when he was 30. Ona, despite three disastrous marriages, was a lesbian who was later linked to both Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich.īurr met his first and only wife, Isabella Ward - Bella, as she preferred to be called - in 1943, during his first season as a trainee actor at the Pasadena Playhouse.
But the gossip columnist Ed Sullivan muddied the waters when he published an unsubstantiated rumour that Ona Munson, who had played Belle Watling in the movie Gone With The Wind, was ‘flirting with San Franciscan Raymond Burr’. He was a chubby baby, exhibiting even then the ample girth that would both help and haunt him for the rest of his days.īy the age of 22, Burr, as far as anyone knew, had never dated anyone.
Raymond William Stacy Burr was born on in New Westminster, British Columbia, Canada. His book was entitled Hiding in Plain Sight: The Secret Life of Raymond Burr. But his definitive biographer, Michael Seth Starr, writing 15 years after Burr’s demise, confronted all the claims head-on, demolishing most of them. Many of the claims Burr made about his life were accepted at face value by his first biographer, Ona Hill, in a book published in the year after his death. This included military service he had never undertaken, battle wounds he had never sustained, early marriages to two women who never existed, the birth and death of a son who was yet another figment of his fantasy, and alleged sexual relationships with female Hollywood stars, one of whom - Natalie Wood - laughed the idea to scorn when I asked her about it. So, to cover his tracks, Burr had begun to invent a completely bogus history for himself. But, in the Hollywood of the 1950s, they were by no means groundless.īurr was alleged to have sexual relationships with female Hollywood stars, one of whom - Natalie Wood - laughed the idea to scorn when I asked her about it Such fears seem preposterous in these more enlightened times. Why should this be, for a man who was both very rich and very successful? It all came down to his terror that he would lose the role of Perry Mason and his entire career as a leading actor if he was exposed as gay and sharing his life with a male lover. His story, littered with spurious claims of the most astonishing kind, was the greatest monument to ‘mythomania’ - an abnormal or pathological tendency to exaggerate or tell lies - in the history of Hollywood. But his private life was the antithesis of what his public life appeared to be.
To British viewers, he was also the star of the popular detective series Ironside, which ran from 1967 to 1975.
Perry Mason is pictured with his co-star Barbara Hale who played his secretary Della Street in The Case Of The Sulky Girlīurr played Mason for nine years from 1957 to 1966 - those episodes are still available on UK TV today - and then in a further 26 TV movies from 1985 to 1993.