William Talman

William Whitney Talman Jr. was born on February 4, 1915, in Detroit, Michigan, to Ada Barber and William Whitney Talman, a vice president of an electronics company. His maternal grandparents, Catherine Gandy and James Wells Barber, had immigrated to the United States from England. Talman founded the drama club at the Cranbrook Kingswood School in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, and continued performing at both Dartmouth College and the University of Michigan. Following his studies, he worked in summer stock while also holding jobs at an iron foundry, paper mills, and boat yards, and worked as an automobile salesman. On February 4, 1942, he entered the United States Army as a private at Camp Upton in Yaphank, Long Island, New York, serving for 30 months in the Pacific Theatre of World War II and ultimately attaining the rank of major.

Talman's stage career preceded his work in film and television. He served as the leading man in the summer stock company at Ivoryton, Connecticut, where he met his first wife, and played the male lead in Dear Ruth during part of its New York run. His Broadway appearances, spanning 1940 to 1947, included the comedy Spring Again, Beverly Hills, and A Young Man's Fancy. He also toured with road companies of Yokel Boy and Of Mice and Men.

After transitioning to film, Talman became closely associated with villainous roles. His breakthrough came in director Richard Fleischer's 1950 film noir Armored Car Robbery, in which he played a career criminal who masterminded the robbery at the center of the story. In the 1952 film Beware, My Lovely, starring Ida Lupino as a war widow terrorized in her home, a photograph of Talman was used to represent her late husband. The following year, he played a sadistic, psychopathic killer in The Hitch-Hiker, directed by Lupino, earning notice from The New York Times for what the paper called one of the year's juiciest assignments.

It was his performance in The Hitch-Hiker that brought Talman to the attention of Gail Patrick Jackson, executive producer of the CBS television series Perry Mason. Jackson had already determined that Talman was her choice for the role of Los Angeles District Attorney Hamilton Burger before casting was finalized, and she later recalled that he never disappointed her throughout the series. Raymond Burr, who had initially auditioned for the role of Burger, was encouraged by Jackson to lose weight and read for the lead role of Mason instead. Talman played Burger across the full nine-year run of Perry Mason from 1957 to 1966, losing all but three cases, including two separate murder trials in the series finale — a record he described as the longest losing streak in history. In the 1960 episode "The Case of the Prudent Prosecutor," Talman had the title role, with Burger disqualifying himself from prosecuting a longtime personal friend accused of murder. When asked by a journalist in 1958 how he felt about Burger's repeated courtroom losses, Talman argued that a district attorney cannot truly lose when he fails to convict an innocent person, and that justice, not conviction, was Burger's primary interest. Beyond Perry Mason, Talman guest-starred in television series including Wagon Train, Have Gun – Will Travel, Cimarron City, and Gunsmoke. Following the cancellation of Perry Mason in 1966, he appeared on The Wild, Wild West and in the first-season Invaders episode "Quantity: Unknown," which was his final on-screen acting role.

In March 1960, Sheriff's deputies raided a party at a West Hollywood apartment and arrested Talman along with seven others on charges of marijuana possession and lewd vagrancy. CBS fired Talman in response, though the charges were subsequently dismissed on June 17 by municipal judge Adolph Alexander for lack of proof. Talman was later rehired following advocacy from executive producer Gail Patrick Jackson, his Perry Mason co-star Raymond Burr, series creator Erle Stanley Gardner, and a large-scale letter-writing campaign by viewers.

Talman was married three times. His first marriage, to actress Lynne Carter, lasted from just before his military service in 1942 until September 1952 and produced one daughter, Lynda. His second wife was actress Barbara Read, whom he married in 1953; they had one daughter, Barbie, and one son, William Whitney Talman III, before divorcing on August 23, 1960. Read also had two sons, Damon and Quentin, from her second marriage. In 1963, Talman married Margaret Louise Larkin Flannigan, who had a son, Steve, and a daughter, Debbie, from a prior marriage. Together they had a son, Timothy, and a daughter, Susan. Margaret Talman survived her husband by nearly 34 years, dying of lung cancer related to smoking in January 2002 at age 73.

A lifelong heavy smoker, Talman was diagnosed with lung cancer and became the first actor in Hollywood to film an antismoking public service announcement for the American Cancer Society. Knowing he was dying at the time of filming, he opened the announcement with the words: "Before I die, I want to do what I can to leave a world free of cancer for my six children." He requested that the commercial not be broadcast until after his death. In a second public service announcement, Talman appeared alongside a still photograph of Raymond Burr and addressed viewers directly, stating that while he had not minded losing courtroom battles, he was now in a battle he did not want to lose, and urging both non-smokers to avoid the habit and smokers to quit. Four weeks after filming that second announcement, on August 30, 1968, Talman died of lung cancer that had metastasized to his liver, bones, and brain. He was 53 years old. He was buried at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in the Hollywood Hills section of Los Angeles.