Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Email
Answers.com

Barbara Hale

 
Actor: Barbara Hale
 
Home > Library > Entertainment & Arts > Actors
  • Born: Apr 18, 1922 in DeKalb, Illinois
  • Occupation: Actor
  • Active: '40s-'90s
  • Major Genres: Mystery, Crime
  • Career Highlights: Perry Mason Returns, Jolson Sings Again, The Boy With Green Hair
  • First Major Screen Credit: The Falcon in Hollywood (1944)

Biography

According to her Rockford, Illinois, high-school yearbook, Barbara Hale hoped to make a career for herself as a commercial artist. Instead, she found herself posing for artists as a professional model. This led to a movie contract at RKO Radio, where she worked her way up from "B"s like The Falcon in Hollywood (1945) to such top-of-the-bill attractions as A Likely Story (1947) and The Boy With Green Hair (1949). She continued to enjoy star billing at Columbia, where among other films she essayed the title role in Lorna Doone (1952). Her popularity dipped a bit in the mid-1950s, but she regained her following in the Emmy-winning role of super-efficient legal secretary Della Street on the Perry Mason TV series. She played Della on a weekly basis from 1957 through 1966, and later appeared in the irregularly scheduled Perry Mason two-hour TV movies of the 1980s and 1990s. The widow of movie leading man Bill Williams, Barbara Hale is the mother of actor/director William Katt. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
Search unanswered questions...

Enter a word or phrase...
All Community Q&A Reference topics

 
Wikipedia: Barbara Hale
Top
Home > Library > Miscellaneous > Wikipedia
Barbara Hale

Raymond Burr as Perry Mason and Barbara Hale as Della Street
Born April 18, 1922 (1922-04-18) (age 87)
DeKalb, Illinois, USA

Barbara Hale (born April 18, 1922)[1] is an Emmy Award-winning American actress best known for her role as Della Street, the loyal secretary of Perry Mason.

Contents

Biography

Personal life

Hale was born in DeKalb, Illinois, the daughter of Willa (née Colvin) and Luther Ezra Hale, a landscape gardener.[2] She has Scottish-Irish ancestry.[3] Hale attended high school in Rockford, Illinois, then began appearing in motion pictures in 1943 after training at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts.

In 1946 she married actor Bill Williams, star of The Adventures of Kit Carson (1951-1955), a union that produced three children (including actor William Katt) and four grandchildren (two grandsons by her son William and one grandson and one granddaughter by youngest daughter Juanita). The marriage lasted for 46 years until his death in 1992 from brain cancer. Hale herself has survived several bouts of cancer. She has also been a spokeswoman for Amana appliances. She is an adherent of the Bahá'í Faith.[4]

Career

Hale was under contract to RKO Radio Pictures in the late 1940s. Although she never became a major film star, she appeared in Higher and Higher (1944) with Frank Sinatra, Lady Luck (1946) opposite Robert Young and Frank Morgan as well as The Window (1949) and Jolson Sings Again (1949), with Larry Parks playing Al Jolson and Hale as his wife, Ellen Clark.

Other films included The Boy with Green Hair (1948) and the title role in Lorna Doone (1951). She played as Julia Hancock in The Far Horizons (1955) with Charlton Heston.

But by far the actress's greatest success was her iconic role of Della Street, the all-knowing secretary and girl Friday to the eminent attorney Perry Mason. Hale starred in in this landmark TV series with Raymond Burr from 1957 to 1966 and reprised her role for a number of television movies beginning in the 1980s. Her son William Katt appeared in several of these latter productions as private detective Paul Drake Jr., son of the character played by William Hopper who had been Mason's staunchest ally during the TV series' original run.

The show was so successful that the actress's contribution was recognized with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. She was nominated for the Emmy Award twice, in 1959 and 1961, winning in 1959.

Hale had a featured role in the movie Airport portraying the wife of pilot Dean Martin. In 1967, she guest starred on the ABC military-western series Custer with Wayne Maunder in the title role. In 1993, she attended Raymond Burr's funeral after he died of liver cancer that year.

References

  1. ^ Some sources cite 1921
  2. ^ Descendants of John Hale Sr. (Frontiersman) - Hale Roots
  3. ^ Barbara Hale - The Private Life and Times of Barbara Hale. Barbara Hale Pictures
  4. ^ The Associated Press (2000-12-30). "Bahai faith teaches universal acceptance of God". http://www.uga.edu/bahai/News/123000-1.html. 

External links

v • d • e
Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actress - Drama Series

Barbara Hale (1959) · Pamela Brown (1962) · Glenda Farrell (1963) · Ruth White (1964) · Lee Grant (1966) · Agnes Moorehead (1967) · Barbara Anderson (1968) · Susan Saint James (1969) · Gail Fisher (1970) · Margaret Leighton (1971) · Jenny Agutter (1972) · Ellen Corby (1973) · Joanna Miles (1974) · Ellen Corby (1975)

This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)

 
 

 

Copyrights:

Actor. Copyright © 2009 All Media Guide, LLC. All rights reserved.  Read more
Wikipedia. This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Barbara Hale".  Read more