Sadly, "Perry Mason" was almost the last role William Hopper ever took (and he probably wished it was the last).

Despite being just 42 when he took the role of Paul Drake, faithful private detective to the hotshot defense lawyer Perry Mason, most of his career lay behind him by that point. Hopper died of a heart attack in 1970, at the age of 55.

He went into a (second) retirement period after "Perry" left the air, returning four years later to appear in the notoriously bad 1970 film "Myra Breckinridge" (Time magazine's review called it "an insult to intelligence, an affront to sensibility and an abomination to the eye").

An early retirement seemed reasonable in Hopper's case, since he took his first role before he was a year old. The son of two acting parents, Hopper's first role was playing "Infant in Carriage" in the 1916 comedy "Sunshine Dad," which starred his father, DeWolf Hopper.

Amazingly, most of his whopping 117 film roles were uncredited -- they were mostly bit parts and non-speaking roles. Some of them came in some pretty notable films, such as 1941's "The Maltese Falcon" and 1942's "Yankee Doodle Dandy." And while 117 seems like a lot of movies, because the roles were mostly small, he was able to squeeze a lot of them into a short time -- for example, he appeared in 24 films in 1941 alone.

He gave up acting to fight in the Second World War, and when he first returned, he didn't go back into the business -- he spent eight years as a car salesman instead. But the lure of the big screen was too strong, and he went back to acting in 1954.

By then, his uncredited days were behind him -- his name appeared on everything he did. His roles included another string of notable films, including the 1956 thriller "The Bad Seed" and the 1955 classic "Rebel Without a Cause," playing Natalie Wood's father.

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