Raymond Burr He was 76 years old. The day after Burr's death, American Bar Association president R. William Ide III released a statement: "Raymond Burr's portrayals of Perry Mason represented lawyers in a professional and dignified manner. ... Mr. Burr strove for such authenticity in his courtroom characterizations that we regard his passing as though we lost one of our own." "The New York Times" reported that Perry Mason had been named second—after F. Lee Bailey, and before Abraham Lincoln, Thurgood Marshall, Janet Reno, Ben Matlock and Hillary Clinton—in a recent "National Law Journal" poll that asked Americans to name the attorney,
Raymond Burr Religion. Burr's performance as the loyal friend of the imprisoned protagonist led to a contract with RKO Radio Pictures. Burr appeared in more than 50 feature films between 1946 and 1957, creating an array of villains that established him as an icon of film noir. Film historian Alain Silver concluded that Burr's most significant work in the genre is in these ten films: "Desperate" (1947), "Sleep, My Love" (1948), "Raw Deal" (1948), "Pitfall" (1948), "Abandoned" (1949), "Red Light" (1950), "M" (1951), "His Kind of Woman" (1951), "The Blue Gardenia" (1953) and "Crime of Passion" (1957). Silver described Burr's private detective