Barbara Hale

The Secretary Who Brought in Millions

Barbara Hale arrived in Chicago to study art and ended up modeling in ads for a coal brand. She wasn't looking to act. But an RKO talent scout spotted her on a poster and sent her straight to California with a contract paying 75 dollars a week, which she accepted without thinking twice.

In 1943, she made her debut with a tiny role in Gildersleeve's Bad Day. That year was a whirlwind of small appearances where she learned the craft one take at a time. Her first big break came alongside Frank Sinatra in Higher and Higher (a light musical comedy), where she tried not to get distracted by the screams of fans surrounding the studio.

During the 1940s, she worked nonstop on Hollywood's B movies. She appeared in The Window in 1949, playing a mother who doesn't believe her son's testimony about a murder. The film cost very little but generated immediate profits at the box office of the time.

RKO played up her girl-next-door image until she decided she wanted more than being the leading man's love interest of the moment.

Nobody expected that success.

In 1956, she received a call to read the script for a legal drama series based on Erle Stanley Gardner's novels. The role was Della Street. At first she hesitated, not wanting to tie herself to television for years. In the end she accepted and wound up filming 271 episodes between 1957 and 1966.

The chemistry with Raymond Burr worked from the first day of filming. They were close friends and played harsh pranks on set. Once, Burr filled her dressing room with live chicks just to see her reaction when she opened the door. She won the Emmy for Best Supporting Actress in 1959 for this role.

And the gamble paid off.

She earned salaries many movie stars envied while keeping a stable family life on her ranch. She married actor Bill Williams in 1946, and they stayed together until his death in 1992. They were one of the few lasting unions in an industry that chewed through marriages every few months.

The Eighties Comeback

After the original series ended in 1966, she stepped away from the spotlight to raise her three children. She turned down mediocre scripts and focused on her private life, far from the paparazzi's cameras. But in 1985, NBC decided to bring back the Perry Mason character in a made-for-TV movie format.

She only set one condition for coming back.

She was supposed to be Raymond Burr on the project. They filmed 30 movies under the Perry Mason brand between 1985 and 1995. Even after Burr's death in 1993, she stayed on in production alongside Paul Sorvino and James Garner to wrap up the loose storylines of television's most famous law office.

Her son William Katt also appeared in several of these installments, playing investigator Paul Drake Jr. That allowed the family to work together for months on the Denver sets. In 2000, she voiced a character in the Disney animated film Dinosaur (her last professional appearance in the industry).

Barbara Hale died at her California home on January 26, 2017, at the age of 94 from complications of COPD. She was buried at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in the Hollywood Hills.