Raymond William Stacey Burr (May 21, 1917 – September 12, 1993) was an actor, most known for his roles in the television dramas Perry Mason and Ironside.

He was born in New Westminster, British Columbia, Canada to William Johnston Burr (a descendant of Irish immigrants) and Minerva Smith (who was of Scottish and English descent). A dual citizen of Canada and the United States, Burr served in the U.S. Navy in World War II and was wounded at the Battle of Okinawa. Burr broke into films in 1946 and made 90 in the next decade. He co-starred in the classics A Place in the Sun and Rear Window. Burr usually played menacing villains on the screen, although in 1956 he played the heroic reporter Steve Martin in Godzilla, King of the Monsters, the American re-edited version of the Japanese film Gojira. He reprised this role nearly three decades later in Godzilla 1985.


With the international success of Godzilla, and shortly after starring on the radio drama Fort Laramie, Burr was chosen to star in 1957 in Perry Mason where he played Erle Stanley Gardner's clever defense attorney who always defended the innocent and only lost one case ("The Case of the Deadly Verdict," 10/17/1963; his client withheld evidence needed to win). The show was very popular and lasted nine years. In 1967, Burr started another long running television series Ironside (known as A Man Called Ironside in the UK) in which he played a police chief who used a wheelchair for mobility. This show ran until 1975. Subsequent to this, Burr had a couple of other short-lived series such as Kingston: Confidential but was unable to repeat his earlier hits. He co-starred in such TV films as Love's Savage Fury (1979), Eischied: Only The Pretty Girls Die (1979), Disaster On The Coastliner (1979), The Curse Of King Tut's Tomb (1980), The Night The City Screamed (1980), Peter And Paul (1981), and They Call Me MISTER Bonobo! (1982). Burr 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). In 1985, Burr made a comeback as Perry Mason and made a series of 26 two-hour movies that were enormous ratings blockbusters, the last being completed only a few weeks prior to his death. By this time he was a wheelchair user (in his final Mason movie, he is always shown either sitting, or standing while leaning on a table, but never standing unsupported), as his character in Ironside had been, but this time due to his real-life failing health. He also reprised the role of Ironside not long before his death, having to dye his hair red and shave off his trademark beard in order not to look too much like Perry Mason.