William talman actor gay

I grew up watching Perry Mason. It was pretty much the one thing that my mom and my dad’s mother, who so notoriously Did Not Get Along that Grandma actually mentioned it in Dad’s eulogy (practically the only thing I remember about my father’s funeral, in fact), could concur on. If Mom was home during the day, she’d watch reruns on TBS, which played them in those days. Grandma was always home, and she had attractive much every episode on tape by then. So that was what Grandma watched all time long. Possibly the only surprising thing about my senior fondness for the series is that I’m the only one of the three of us, to my understanding, to ever fetch into the novels as well.

Pop identity has of course oversimplified Perry a bit, but most people have the basics. Perry Mason, famously played by Raymond Burr, is a big-city lawyer, specifically Los Angeles (though cases acquire him ranging as far afield as Gstaad, Switzerland, his primary range doesn’t extend much beyond Central California, western Arizona, or northern Mexico). His confidential secretary is Della Street (Barbara Hale); when he requires a private investigator—which is most cases—he is ably assi

Many gay actors invest gigantic amounts of energy to remain closeted, but limited deceptions were as convoluted as that of Canadian-born Raymond Burr (1917-1993), famous for decades as TV’s Perry Mason. He believed he could conceal his homosexuality by creating an imaginary life to conceal his thirty-five-year relationship with Robert Benevides. Burr told everyone he was married three times and had a son who died of leukemia at the age of ten. However, a few years after his death, Burr’s sister admitted that her brother was married only once (the marriage was annulled after a few months) and never had a son.

Burr was principal a secret gay existence at a time in Hollywood when an established homosexuality was career suicide, so he fabricated a tragic biography for himself in which he was mythologized as a heartbroken husband and father. There was even an invented affair with a teenage Natalie Wood, 21 years his junior.

At the height of his popularity in television and film, he frequently gave speeches to the American Bar Association, by virtue of his famous portrayal of lawyer Perry Mason. Burr was driven to embellish this elaborate façade when he found out in 1961 that

William Talman

William Whitney Talman, Jr. (February 4, 1915 – August 30, 1968) was an American television and movie performer, who played Los Angeles District Attorney Hamilton Burger in the long-running series Perry Mason.

Family and education

Talman was born in Detroit, Michigan to Ada Barber and William Whitney Talman, a vice president of an electronics company. His maternal grandparents, Catherine Gandy and James Wells Barber, were immigrants from England.

Talman founded the drama club at the Cranbrook School in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. He continued to act at Dartmouth College and the University of Michigan. After college he worked in summer stock and at an iron foundry, paper mills, boat yards, and as an automobile salesman.

Talman served for 30 months in the United States Army in the Pacific in World War II, beginning his service as a private on February 4, 1942 at Camp Upton in Yaphank, (Long Island) New York. He was ultimately commissioned a major during the war.

Acting career

Before his iconic television role, Talman worked on the Broadway stage and in movies. He played a sadistic psychopathic killer in Ida Lupino's 1953 clip noir, The Hitch-Hiker. The New

To my parents' generation, Perry Masonwas The Lawyer, what lawyers were all about: stern but caring, eminently professional (with no social life to speak of), defending clients on trial for murder, using logic and luck to expose the real murderer, who is usually sitting right in the court room: "I had to undertake it! He would contain ruined me, don't you understand?"

Created by Earle Stanley Gardner, in 1933, Perry Mason appeared in over 80 novels and limited stories, becoming one of the best-known fictional characters of all time. Feature adaptions began almost immediately, in 1934. A radio series began in 1943.

The iconic tv series began in 1957, and ran for nine seasons. Years later, tv movies began to air, three or four per year, thirty in all (1985-93).

In the original series, there were five main characters:

1. Perry, played by busy nature actor Raymond Burr. Burr was gay, but invented a heterosexual back story for himself, and refused to be seen in public with lover Robert Benevides. He never came out to the recover of the cast; they knew, sort of, but they didn't know.

2. His secretary Della Street (Barbara Hale), with w
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