Biography

"I offer you the most rewarding gift you will ever have an opportunity to give someone you love ... THE HOLY BIBLE ...the world's most important book, and a gift of a lifetime for anyone to receive."

ALEXANDER SCOURBY, November 13 1913 - February 22 1985

The precise, mellifluous voice of Alexander Scourby, trained in Shakespearean roles in the 1930's and perfected in radio dramatic parts in the 1940's, has become a well-known sound on Broadway, in motion pictures, and on television, where as Harriet Van Horne has observed, he is "the most sensitive and knowing narrator in the business." His most appreciative audience, however, is found among the nearly 80,000 borrowers of Talking Books, the recordings of literature produced under the supervision of the Division for the Blind of the Library of Congress for the use of the legally blind. Scourby, who has recorded about 300 books for the blind, has described this as "the one work that really means something to me." Nelson Coon, a former regional librarian in the Library of Congress' program for the blind, has observed in the letters column of the Saturday Review (September 9, 1961): "The dependence on and satisfaction in the voice of Alexander Scourby among blind people is something you would not believe unless you had been a librarian."

Alexander Scourby was born in Brooklyn, New York on. November 13, 1913 to Constantine Nicholas and Betsy (Patsakos) Scourby, both of whom were immigrants from Greece. His father was a successful restaurateur and wholesale baker and an ill-advised investor in some motion-picture failures. Scourby has two sisters, Lula and Mary. A brother, Nicholas, is dead.

Reared in. Brooklyn, Scourby was a member of a Boy Scout troop there and later a cadet with the 101st National Guard Cavalry Regiment. He attended public and private schools in Brooklyn, spending his summer vacations in New Jersey, upstate New York, and at a cousin's home in Massachusetts. Dismissed from Polytechnic Prep School, he finished his secondary education at Brooklyn Manual Training High School, which he has described as "an ordinary high school that had an awful lot of shop."

As an adolescent, Scourby, who was co-editor of the magazine and yearbook at Manual Training High School, envisioned a career in writing. But he came to realize, as he has said, that writing was for him "absolutely the most painful thing in. the world" and that he "could never meet a deadline," whereas he found the reading aloud of plays easy and enjoyable. Encouraged by some of his teachers, he began to turn. his attention to acting. He made his stage debut with the high school's dramatic society, as the juvenile in Augustin MacHugh's - The Meanest Man in the World.

When he graduated from high school in 1931, Scourby, not yet having abandoned the idea of a writing career, entered West Virginia University at Morgantown, West Virginia to study journalism. During his first semester at West Virginia he joined the campus drama group and played a character role in A. A. Milne's comedy Mr. Pim Passes By. In February 1932, as he was beginning his second semester, his father died, and he left the university to help run the family's pie bakery in Brooklyn.

About a month after Scourby returned to Brooklyn, he was accepted as an apprentice at Eva Le Gallienne's Civic Repertory Theatre on 14th Street in downtown Manhattan. At the Civic Repertory he was taught dancing, speech, and make-up, and was given his first professional role, a. walk-on in Liliom. In 1933 Scourby and other Civic Repertory apprentices joined together to form the Apprentice Theatre, which presented plays at the New School for Social Research in New York City during the 1933-34 season.

Scourby's first role on Broadway was that of the Player King in Leslie Howard's production of Hamlet, which opened at the Imperial Theatre on November 10, 1936 and went on tour after thirty-nine performances. Returning to New York and unemployment in. the spring of 1937, Scourby was introduced to the American Foundation for the Blind's Talking Book program by Wesley Addy, a member of the Hamlet cast and Scourby's roommate on the tour, who was recording plays at the Foundation.

The American Foundation for the Blind offers to the 450 agencies concerned with the estimated 400,000 sightless persons in the United States more than 100 services that would be difficult or impossible for individual agencies to provide on their own. The Talking Book service was conceived by Dr. Robert B. lrwin, then executive director of the Foundation, after a survey in 1929 which revealed that only 15 percent of the sightless population was sufficiently skilled at touch reading to enjoy books in Braille. In 1934 an act of Congress authorized governmental financing of the project, and the American Foundation for the Blind, under the supervision of the Library of Congress, began issuing readings of complete books by professional actors on long-playing records. Today as many as 400 Talking Books of fiction, nonfiction, drama, and poetry are produced annually (partly by the AFB and partly by the American. Printing House for the Blind, Louisville) and distributed by the Library of Congress, in editions up to 500, to thirty-two regional libraries serving nearly 80,000 blind borrowers.

After auditioning at the American Foundation for the Blind in the spring of 1937, Scourby was cast in a small part in a recording of Antony and Cleopatra. During the following summer he was again, the Player King in a production of Hamlet at Dennis, Massachusetts that featured Eva Le Gallienne in. the title role. When he returned to the American Foundation, for the Blind later in the year to record plays he was told that the company of actors was filled but that he might record a novel if ho wished. "That was the beginning of it," he said in scanning his career years later, adding, "The recordings for the blind are perhaps the greatest achievement. Most of the things I look back at in the theater were either insignificant parts in great plays or good parts in terrible plays. So it really doesn't amount to anything, whereas I have recorded some great books."

In Maurice Evans' Hamlet, which opened at the St. James Theatre in New York on October 12, 1938 and ran for ninety-six performances, Scourby played Rosencrantz. Later in the same season he appeared with Evans in Henry IV, Part I as the Earl of Westmoreland, and the following year he toured with Evans in King Richard II as one of the hirelings of the king.

A writer in Variety (May 16, 1962) has described the quality of Scourby's voice as "the kind of resonance closely associated by listeners with bigtime radio." Scourby began working in radio in 1939 and by the early 1940's he was playing running parts in five of the serial melodramas popularly known as soap operas, including Against the Storm, in which he replaced Arnold Moss for two years. He narrated the Andre Kostelanetz musical show for a year, using the pseudonym "Alexander Scott" at the request of the sponsors, and his voice was heard on many dramatic shows, including NBC's Sunday program The Eternal Light (with which he was to remain, despite heavy commitments elsewhere, through the 1950's). On Superman, his was the voice of the title character's father in the one program devoted to the prodigy's origins. During World War II Scourby did broadcasts beamed abroad in Greek and English for the Office of War Information.

Meanwhile Scourby had been keeping a hand in the theater by doing summer stock. He returned to Broadway in late 1946, replacing Ruth Chatterton as the narrator in Ben Hecht's A Flag Is Born, a one-act: dramatic pageant produced by the American League for a Free Palestine at the Alvin Theatre. On December 22, 1947 he opened with John Gielgud in Rodney Ackland's dramatization of Crime and Punishment at the National Theatre in New York, playing Razournikhim, friend to Gielgud's Raskolnikoff.

Scourby was one of the founders of New Stages, a drama company that went into operation in a small theater on Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village, New York City in the 1947- 48 season. During its two-year existence, the company presented Garcia Lorca's Blood Wedding, Edward Caulfield's Bruno and Sidney, and two plays by Jean-Paul Sartre and The Victors.

In Sidney Kingsley's Detective Story, which opened at the Hudson Theatre on. March 23, 1949 and ran for a year and eight months, Scourby played Tami Giacoppetti, the tough racketeer. Almost immediately after Detective Story closed, Scourby began rehearsing another Kingsley role on Broadway, that of lvanoff, the old Bolshevik friend of Rubashov in Darkness at Noon, a dramatization of Arthur Koestler's novel. The play opened at the Alvin Theatre on January 13, 1951, with Claude Rains playing Rubashov, and ran for 163 performances. When the Theatre Guild revived George Bernard Shaw's Saint Joan later in the same year, with Uta Hagcn in the title role, Scourby was cast as Peter Cauchon, the Bishop of Beauvais. The play was presented at the Cort Theatre from October 4, 1951 to February 2, 1952.

Scourby's first motion-picture appearances were in two films with Glenn Ford, Affair in Trinidad (Columbia, 1952) and The Big Heat (Columbia, 1953). He subsequently played a Greek officer in Korea in The Glory Brigade (Twentieth Century-Fox, 1953) and a Biblical character in The Silver Chalice (Wamer Brothers, 1959), and he again appeared with Glenn Ford in Ransom (MGM, 1956). "None of the pictures I've done have been really important or very good," Scourby has said, "with the exception - and it is debatable - of Giant." In Giant (Wamer Brothers, 1956), the film version of Edna Ferber's novel that starred James Dean, Scourby played Polo, the old Mexican ranch foreman. He later had a role in The Big Fisherman (Buena Vista, 1959). During his flurry of motion-picture activity in the 1950's, Scourby, who had been living with his wife and child in an apartment near Columbia University in New York City for ten years, bought a home in Beverly Hills, California. Calls for Scourby to work in New York, however, soon made the Beverly Hills residence as much a commutation point as a home.

Back on the New York stage, Scourby played Rakitin in Emlyn Williams' adaptation of Turgenev's A Month in the Country and Peter Cauchon in Siobhan McKenna's interpretation of Saint Joan, both presented at the Off-Broadway Phoenix Theatre in 1956. Again at the Phoenix, he played King Claudius in Hamlet in the spring of 1961, bringing to the role, as Howard Taubman noted in the New York Times (March 17, 1961), the appropriate "fret of fear and decay."

In 1963 Scourby was given the featured role of Gorotchenko, the Communist commissar who stalks a White Russian noble couple fleeing the Revolution, in Tovarich, a Broadway musical by Lee Pockriss and Anne Croswell based on the comedy by Robert E. Sherwood and Jacques Deval, The musical opened at the Broadway Theatre on March 18, 1963, with Vivien Leigh and Jean-Pierre Aumont as Scourby's prey. "The signal tribute to Alexander Scourby . . . ," Norman Nadel observed in the New York World-Telegram and Sun (April 2, 1963), "was the hearty hissing opening night as he strolled on stage. In polished villainy, he has no peer." Soon after Tovarich closed on. November 9, 1963, after 264 performances, Scourby began rehearsals in Los Angeles for a Theatre Group presentation of Anton Chekhov's The Sea Gull, in which he starred with Jeannette Nolan for forty performances beginning on January 10, 1964.

Since the early 1950's Scourby has been working in television as both a narrator and actor. One of his constant assignments as a narrator has been NBC-TV's Project 20 show. He narrated a ninety-minute condensation of the television series Victory at Sea for Project 20 in 1954. His assignments for the program since that time have included Three, Two, One, Zero, about the atomic bomb, and three religious documentaries using great paintings to tell the Bible story: The Coming of Christ, a Christmas show; He Is Risen, an Easter show; and The Law and Prophets of the Old Testament.

As a television, actor, Scourby has had major roles in dramas presented on such notable programs as Playhouse 90, Circle Theater, and Studio One. He has refused to tie himself down to a series, because, as he has explained, "it's hard to do good things that way." He has, however, accepted occasional parts in Daniel Boone. The Man from U.N.C.L.E., The Defenders, and other set-format dramatic shows. Most of the filmed shows are made in California. Partly to give himself more time on the East Coast, he has, since 1960, lent his voice to certain television commercials, notably those of Eastern Airlines.

The Talking Books that Scourby has recorded for the blind number in the hundreds and range from the Bible and the Iliad to Gilbert Highet's Talents and Geniuses. The majority of the recordings arc novels, both contemporary, such as Ship of Fools, and classic, such as War and Peace and The Idiot. Besides his work for Talking Books, Scourby does readings for his own company, Lectern Records. Paraphrasing Gregory Ziemer, the director of public education at the American Foundation for the Blind, Kevin Wallace in the New Yorker (November 3, 1962) has said that Scourby "rates as high with Talking Book fans as Sinatra does with the popular-ballad public."

Alexander Scourby and Lori von Eltz were married on May 12, 1943. Mrs. Scourby, the daughter of the late motion-picture actor Theodor von Eltz, is an actress known to television, Broadway, and motion-picture audiences as Lori March. The Scourby's have a daughter, Alexandra, born on March 27, 1944. Scourby is five feet ten and one half inches tall and weighs about 167 pounds. His hair is grayish black and his eyes are bluish green. Scourby has no political affiliation, although he usually votes Democratic, and no religious affiliation, although he was baptized in the Greek Orthodox Church and married in the Episcopal (the wedding ceremony was repeated in the Orthodox rite to please his family). Once an addict of the photographic darkroom, Scourby now finds most of his recreation on the grounds of his country house, cutting firewood, mowing the pasture and lawn, and plowing the garden.

References
N Y Post Mag p11 S 18 '49 por
Variety 226:27+ My 16 '62

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