Hale also starred with Williams, her husband, in ‘‘The Clay Pigeon’’ (1949), a taut drama about a veteran who is framed on a murder charge. In ‘‘The Window’’ (1949), a first-rate thriller, she and Arthur Kennedy played the preoccupied parents of a tenement youth (Bobby Driscoll) who witnesses a murder and becomes the target of the killers. She rose to leading parts opposite Mitchum in ‘‘West of the Pecos’’ (1945) and the comedy-romance ‘‘Lady Luck (1946) with Robert Young. ‘‘I never had been so scared in my life,’’ she later told the Los Angeles Times, ‘‘but he’s been a very dear friend ever since.’’ In a small role, she sang with Sinatra in ‘‘Higher and Higher’’ (1943).
RKO studios in Hollywood took notice of her striking looks and put her under contract for movie work. She won a beauty contest while in high school, and while attending the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts, she began modeling.
It’s a first!’’Īfter Burr’s death in 1993, the TV movies continued briefly with Hale as Street and Hal Holbrook playing a defense lawyer named ‘‘Wild Bill’’ McKenzie.īarbara Hale was born April 18, 1922, in De Kalb, Ill., and grew up in Rockford, Ill., where her father was a landscape gardener. Hale was doing interviews to promote ‘‘The Case of the Telltale Talk Show Host,’’ which aired in 1993, she confided to a reporter, ‘‘This week, at the end of the show, very quietly and very surprisingly, Perry plants one on Della. They tended to accent the personal, thoroughly platonic bond between Mason and Street far more than the old series.Īs Ms. ‘‘Perry Mason Returns’’ was an enormous hit and led to a run of made-for-television movies. Hale’s son, William, played the private eye role. Hale and Burr reunited in 1985 for ‘‘Perry Mason Returns,’’ in which Mason takes leave from a judgeship to exonerate his former secretary from a murder charge.
She later appeared in movies such as the all-star disaster film ‘‘Airport’’ (1970) - as the wife of a pilot played by Dean Martin - and for years was a commercial pitchwoman for Amana kitchen appliances. She has an instinct for doing exactly the right thing when it is needed.’’ Burr, who cultivated orchids in his spare time, named one after her. Burr once called her ‘‘a remarkably intuitive actress. Hale, who won a 1959 Emmy for best supporting actress in a dramatic series, stayed with the show until it folded. The perpetually stymied adversary was the district attorney played by William Talman. Hale as the glamorous and unflappable secretary who gamely stays late at the office every day.
The television series was propelled by the chemistry among its top cast: Burr as the brilliant courtroom tactician, William Hopper as the private investigator who helps Mason pull off his legal victories in down-to-the-wire dramatics, and Ms. There had been many Mason iterations, including a movie series and radio show. Mason, who solved murder mysteries with his savvy as a cross-examiner, is the creation of novelist Erle Stanley Gardner. Two decades later, she reprised her role in more than two dozen made-for-TV movies for NBC. Hale earned an Emmy Award for her role as Street.
The series aired from 1957 to 1966, making it one of the longest-running courtroom shows in history, and Ms. Hale had a flourishing career in movies - often in wholesome roles opposite stars such as James Stewart, James Cagney, and Robert Mitchum - she found her big-screen career overshadowed by her work on CBS’s ‘‘Perry Mason.’’