TV and movie starlet dead

BARBARA Hale, who found her most famous role on television as steadfast secretary Della Street on the long-running Perry Mason TV series, has died at 94.

Jaqueline Stander, an agent for Hale’s son, actor William Katt, said she died on Thursday at her Los Angeles area home, with her family at her side.

“She was gracious and kind and silly and always fun to be with,” Katt, who was in The Greatest American Hero and Carrie, said on his Facebook page.

He described his mother as a wonderful actress and a “treasure as a friend and mother”.

Hale appeared in Perry Mason on CBS from 1957 to 1966 and won an Emmy as best actress in 1959.

When the show was revived in 1985 on NBC as an occasional TV movie, she again appeared in court at the side of the ever-victorious lawyer, played by Raymond Burr.

She continued her role after Burr died in 1993 and was replaced by Hal Holbrook, for the movies, which continued into 1995.

“I guess I was just meant to be a secretary who doesn’t take shorthand,” she once quipped.

“I’m a lousy typist, too – 33 words a minute.”

Hale was born in DeKalb, Illinois, daughter of a landscape gardener and a home-maker.

She studied at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts, where she was often sought as a model – and her work for a modelling agency prompted an offer for a routine contract at the RKO studio in Hollywood.

When she reported to the casting director, he was speaking on the phone to someone who needed an immediate replacement for an actress who was sick.

“It hit every paper the next day: the Cinderella story,” she recalled in a 1993 Chicago Tribune interview.

“Of course they said it was a starring role. I had one line, but you know about those things.”

The movie was a quickie, Gildersleeve’s Bad Day, but she went on to appear with Pat O’Brien in The Iron Major, Frank Sinatra in Higher And Higher and Robert Young in Lady Luck. Later films included the original Airport and The Giant Spider Invasion.