The character of Hamilton Burger temporarily disappeared from the TV series during the series' third season. Talman was fired by CBS March 18, 1960, hours after he entered a not-guilty plea to misdemeanor charges related to his presence at a party that was raided by police.
William Talman played the frustrated District Attorney Hamilton Burger in the original 1957-65 Perry Mason television series. But Mr. Macaulay assumed the role for a group of TV movies in the 1980s and early 1990s, after starting as the judge in Perry Mason Returns in 1985.Aug 21, 1999
The best-known incarnation of Perry Mason came in the form of a CBS TV series simply titled Perry Mason which ran from 1957 to 1966, with Raymond Burr in the title role. The series also featured Barbara Hale as Della Street, William Hopper as Paul Drake, William Talman as Hamilton Burger and Ray Collins as Lt. Tragg.
The two surviving stars of the CBS-TV series, Raymond Burr and Barbara Hale, reprised their roles as Mason and Della Street. In the first telefilm, Perry Mason Returns, Mason is an appellate court judge who resigns his position to successfully defend his secretary Della on murder charges. William Katt, Hale's son, was cast as Paul Drake, Jr. William Hopper, who played private investigator Paul Drake in the original TV series, had died years earlier; Hopper's photograph appears on Paul Drake Jr.'s desk. In the later TV movies, Mason used the services of attorney Ken Malansky, played by William R. Moses .
Several years after Perry Mason was cancelled, a new series, The New Perry Mason, aired in 1973 featuring Monte Markham in the title role. A total of 15 episodes aired before being cancelled halfway through its first season.
Perry Mason features in 82 novels and 4 short stories, all of which involve a client being charged with murder, usually involving a preliminary hearing or jury trial. Typically, Mason establishes his client's innocence by finding the real murderer.
Regular characters. Recurring characters in the Perry Mason stories include the following: Perry Mason: Los Angeles attorney introduced in the 1933 novel, The Case of the Velvet Claws. Della Street: Mason's confidential secretary introduced in the 1933 novel, The Case of the Velvet Claws.
Perry Mason was adapted for radio as a 15-minute daily crime series that aired from 1943 to 1955 on CBS Radio. It had little in common with the usual portrayal of Mason, so much so that Gardner withdrew his support for a TV version of the daytime serial that began airing on CBS in 1956. The general theme of the radio series was continued, with a different title and characters, as The Edge of Night.
Occupation. Lawyer. Nationality. American. Perry Mason is a fictional character, an American criminal defense lawyer who is the main character in works of detective fiction written by Erle Stanley Gardner. Perry Mason features in 82 novels and 4 short stories, all of which involve a client being charged with murder, ...
Perry Mason movie series of the 1930s, The Case of the Black Cat. He was portrayed by Guy Usher. The character, now portrayed by Charles C. Wilson, played a larger role in the sixth and final film in the series, The Case of the Stuttering Bishop .
Mason believes, as does Della Street, that Burger is helping mainly so that he can run for DA when Barnes is humiliated by losing the high-profile case, but he does not himself confirm this .
Talman was fired by CBS March 18, 1960, hours after he entered a not-guilty plea to misdemeanor charges related to his presence at a party that was raided by police.
Nationality. American. Hamilton Burger is the fictional Los Angeles County District Attorney (D.A.) in the long-running series of novels, films, and radio and television programs featuring Perry Mason, the fictional defense attorney created by Erle Stanley Gardner .
Hamilton Burger first appears in chapter 10 of Gardner's 1935 novel, The Case of the Counterfeit Eye, in which he is described as "a broad-shouldered, thick-necked individual with a close-cropped moustache".
In her confirmation hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee in July 2009, Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotoma yor prefaced her remarks on the role of the prosecutor by claiming that she was inspired by watching Perry Mason as a child, explaining, "I was influenced so greatly by a television show in igniting the passion that I had as being a prosecutor, and it was Perry Mason. In her 2013 memoir, Sotomayor, now a Supreme Court justice, wrote of the show's influence on her while she was growing up in a Bronx housing project. Sotomayor granted that the defense attorney was the show's hero, "but my sympathies were not entirely monopolized by Perry Mason . I was fond of Burger, the prosecutor, too. I liked that he was a good loser, that he was more committed to finding the truth than to winning his case. If the defendant was truly innocent, he once explained, and the case was dismissed, then he had done his job because justice had been served."
Burger did defeat Mason twice on the television series: in "The Case of the Terrified Typist" (episode 1-38), and in "The Case of the Deadly Verdict" (episode 7-4), a much-publicized episode that begins with Mason's client being sentenced to death.
Recurring characters in the Perry Mason stories include the following:
• Perry Mason: Los Angeles attorney introduced in the 1933 novel, The Case of the Velvet Claws.
• Della Street: Mason's confidential secretary introduced in the 1933 novel, The Case of the Velvet Claws.
As a child, Gardner read the magazine Youth's Companion, published by the Perry Mason Company - a name Gardner later borrowed for his fictional attorney. Gardner provided more information about Mason's character in earlier novels while knowledge of his character is largely taken for granted in the later works, the television series and movies. In the first novel (The Case of the Velvet Claws, 1933), Mason describes himself in the following way: