Perry Mason (TV film series) Raymond Burr starred as Los Angeles criminal defense lawyer Perry Mason, a character created by American author and attorney Erle Stanley Gardner. Television producer Dean Hargrove resurrected the Perry Mason character in a series of television films for NBC beginning in 1985. Dean Hargrove was able to bring back the two then-surviving major stars, Raymond Burr and Barbara Hale (reprising their roles as Mason and Della Street) for the first telefilm, "Perry Mason Returns", in which Mason resigns his position as an appellate court judge to defend Street on a murder charge. William Katt, Hale's own son, was cast as
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