She had a telling part in the original “disaster movie”, Airport (1970), and in 1975 she played the lead opposite Steve Brodie in the unforgettable disaster of a film The Giant Spider Invasion. When CBS cancelled Perry Mason, Hale reverted to episodic television, including a spot on Burr’s successful police series Ironside and regular roles in Disney’s Wonderful World of Color. Ironically, in her last feature film before Perry Mason, Desert Hell, she played the unfaithful wife of a Foreign Legion commander. She then worked in episodic television such as Playhouse 90, and made The Oklahoman (1957) with Joel McCrea, and an interesting picture about a manufactured western movie star, Slim Carter (1957), alongside both her husband and Hopper. She had the title role in Lorna Doone (1951) but became a feature in low-budget but interesting Columbia westerns, including André de Toth’s remake of Sahara, Last of the Comanches (1953) and Joseph H Lewis’s 7th Cavalry (1956), her last Columbia picture. Her light touch saw her cast with James Stewart and James Cagney, and opposite Robert Cummings in the early Frank Tashlin comedy The First Time (1952). She moved to Columbia, where she generally played adoring wives and steadfast girlfriends. Her best RKO parts came working with child actors, Dean Stockwell in Joseph Losey’s The Boy With Green Hair (1948) and Bobby Driscoll in Ted Tetzlaff’s noirish The Window (1949), her penultimate RKO release. Hale, a more talented actor, was trapped in lesser studio parts until she too found success on the smaller screen. Williams would go on to star on television as Kit Carson in a successful western series. At RKO, she met the actor Bill Williams (born Wilhelm Katt), and after making West of the Pecos (1945) together, in which Hale starred with Robert Mitchum, they married. Her first starring role came opposite Robert Young in a gambling comedy, Lady Luck (1946). Photograph: Snap/Rexīut she landed a contract at RKO, and got her first screen credit in the Frank Sinatra movie Higher and Higher (1943). View image in fullscreen Barbara Hale and Frank Sinatra in Higher and Higher (1943). Burr bred orchids, and named one after his co-star. Although publicists tried to promote the idea of a romance between Burr and Hale, in reality he lived with a man, though he and Hale became devoted friends, with a common love of horticulture. Mason’s creator, Erle Stanley Gardner, reportedly leaped from his chair during test screenings for Burr, a classic film noir heavy, shouting “that’s Perry Mason”. William Talman, as the always-losing district attorney Hamilton Burger, and Ray Collins, as the police detective Arthur Tragg, were great character actors. “When we started it was the beginning of women not working at home,” she said. Although Hale’s all-American girl-next-door looks had seen her cast typically as supportive wives in her film career, in Perry Mason she was a single career woman, who out-bantered Drake’s flirtatious advances in almost every episode. Della’s indefatigable calm and poise established her as a partner to the LA lawyer Mason (Raymond Burr) and his investigator, Paul Drake (William Hopper). She reprised the role in 29 TV movies between 19. In the hugely successful US television series Perry Mason (1957-66), Barbara Hale, who has died aged 94, played Della Street, Mason’s secretary.
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