Alexander Scourby

Alexander Scourby was an American actor, narrator, and voice artist born in Brooklyn, New York, on November 13, 1913, and died on February 22, 1985. His Broadway career spanned from 1936 to 1972, and he became widely recognized for his deep, resonant voice and Mid-Atlantic accent across film, television, and radio.

Scourby was born to Constantine Nicholas Scourby, a restaurateur, wholesale baker, and occasional investor in independent films, and Betsy Patsakos, a homemaker, both immigrants from Greece. He attended public and private schools in Brooklyn, was dismissed from Polytechnic Prep School, and completed his secondary education at Brooklyn Manual Training High School, where he co-edited the school magazine and yearbook. After graduating in 1931, he enrolled at West Virginia University to study journalism, but left during his second semester following the death of his father to help operate the family bakery in Brooklyn.

Shortly after returning to Brooklyn, Scourby was accepted as an apprentice at Eva Le Gallienne's Civic Repertory Theatre on 14th Street in Manhattan, where he received training in dancing, speech, and makeup and earned his first professional role, a walk-on in Liliom. In 1933, he joined fellow Civic Repertory apprentices in forming the Apprentice Theatre, which staged productions at the New School for Social Research during the 1933–34 season. His Broadway debut came on November 10, 1936, when he appeared as the player king in Leslie Howard's production of Hamlet at the Imperial Theatre, which ran for thirty-nine performances before going on tour. He reprised a Hamlet role in 1938, this time playing Rosencrantz in Maurice Evans' production at the St. James Theatre, which ran for ninety-six performances. Later that same season he appeared with Evans in Henry IV, Part 1 as the Earl of Westmoreland, and the following year toured with Evans in Richard II as one of the king's hirelings.

Scourby returned to Broadway in late 1946, replacing Ruth Chatterton as the narrator in Ben Hecht's A Flag Is Born at the Alvin Theatre, a production in which Marlon Brando appeared in one of his early stage roles. On December 22, 1947, he opened alongside John Gielgud in Rodney Ackland's dramatization of Crime and Punishment at the National Theatre in New York. That same period saw him co-found New Stages, a drama company that operated in a small Greenwich Village theater on Bleecker Street during the 1947–48 season, presenting works by Federico García Lorca, Edward Caulfield, and Jean-Paul Sartre, among others.

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 the racketeer Tami Giacoppetti. Almost immediately after that production closed, he began rehearsing another Kingsley role, that of Ivanoff in Darkness at Noon, a dramatization of Arthur Koestler's novel that opened at the Alvin Theatre on January 13, 1951, with Claude Rains in the lead, running for 163 performances. Later in 1951, when the Theatre Guild revived George Bernard Shaw's Saint Joan with Uta Hagen in the title role, Scourby was cast as Peter Cauchon, the Bishop of Beauvais, in a production that ran at the Cort Theatre from October 4, 1951, to February 2, 1952. He also appeared on Broadway in War President.

On screen, Scourby first appeared opposite Glenn Ford in Affair in Trinidad (Columbia, 1952), followed by Fritz Lang's The Big Heat (Columbia, 1953), in which he played the ruthless mob boss Mike Lagana, the role for which he is best remembered in film. He appeared with Ford again in Ransom! (MGM, 1956) and later played Dr. Mikhail Andrassy in The Shaggy Dog (1959).

In radio, Scourby was credited as Hamlet's father the King on a September 19, 1936, CBS Columbia Workshop broadcast directed by Orson Welles. By the early 1940s he was performing running parts in five soap operas, including Against the Storm, in which he replaced Arnold Moss for two years. He narrated André Kostelanetz' musical program for a year under the pseudonym Alexander Scott, and his voice was featured on NBC's The Eternal Light through the 1950s. On The Adventures of Superman, he voiced Jor-El, the title character's father, in the episode devoted to Superman's origins. During World War II, his broadcasts were transmitted abroad in both Greek and English for the Office of War Information.

As a narrator, Scourby narrated 18 episodes of National Geographic Specials between 1966 and 1985, nearly twice as many as any other narrator associated with the series. He recorded the entire King James Version of the Bible in an audio format that has been released in numerous editions, and later recorded the complete Revised Standard Version as well. Over the course of his career he recorded 422 audiobooks for the American Foundation for the Blind, work he described as his most important achievement. His introduction to recording for the blind came in the spring of 1937, when his Hamlet castmate and roommate Wesley Addy introduced him to the foundation's Talking Book program.