Eric Burroughs

Eric Burroughs (November 6, 1911 – November 12, 1992) was an American stage and radio actor born in the Bronx, New York. His career extended from the 1930s into the early 1960s, encompassing Broadway productions, Federal Theatre Project work, and extensive radio performance. His father, Charles Burroughs, was a postal worker and Shakespearean reader; his mother, Williana Burroughs, worked as a New York City public school teacher and was a Communist Party activist.

Burroughs entered the theater in the late 1920s, securing a minor role in Harlem at the Apollo Theatre while still a teenager, having graduated from high school at age sixteen. The production starred Isabelle Washington and ran for six months. His parents, preferring he pursue a formal profession, sent him to Germany to study political science, but Burroughs abandoned that course after two weeks and enrolled instead at the Kammerspiele School of the Theatre in Hamburg, run by director and theatrical producer Erwin Piscator, a leading figure in Epic Theater, a form that foregrounded the socio-political dimensions of drama. While training there, Burroughs appeared in a Piscator production of The Good Soldier Schweik and in several Shakespeare plays, including The Merchant of Venice. In 1930 he attended the International Theatre Conference in Hamburg, where he met Tairoff, director of the Kamerny Theatre in Moscow. With his mother and brothers already in the USSR, Burroughs accepted Tairoff's invitation and spent six months there before returning to Germany to pursue work in theatre and film. He remained in Germany until two weeks after Hitler came to power in 1933, at which point he returned to New York. His German wife, Lotte Manshardt, followed him and the two attempted to establish an independent theater company called Theater Mass, but the venture did not succeed and Manshardt returned to Germany in 1935.

Burroughs's Broadway career ran from 1935 to 1948 and included credits in Let Freedom Ring, Brown Sugar, Set My People Free, Macbeth, and A Long Way From Home. Among these, his role in the 1936 Federal Theatre Project production of Macbeth stands as a defining credit. Directed by the twenty-year-old Orson Welles, the production featured an all-Black cast and was staged at the 1,200-seat Lafayette Theatre. Welles reimagined the character of Hecate, transforming the witch queen of Shakespeare's original into a male Voodoo priest, a role Burroughs performed in a cloak and wielding a twelve-foot bull whip. The production received both popular and critical acclaim. The New York Times reported that Burroughs's concluding line, "The charm's wound up," delivered at the fall of the closing curtain, prompted fifteen minutes of sustained cheering from the audience. A four-minute excerpt of the production, ending with that same line, was preserved in the 1937 WPA documentary short We Work Again. Burroughs also appeared in the 1937 Broadway play Brown Sugar.

Radio became a significant part of Burroughs's professional life during the 1940s and 1950s. Broadcaster and writer Norman Corwin cast him in his 1938 radio play The Plot to Overthrow Christmas, in which Burroughs played the Roman emperor Nero, dispatched by the Devil to assassinate Santa Claus. The production was revived in 1940 and again in 1944. Corwin later described Burroughs as the finest Negro actor in radio. During this same period Burroughs also appeared on stage in a production of The Petrified Forest and took the role of Mr. D in Eartha Kitt's production of Mrs. Patterson. In 1959 he had a small speaking role in the film Odds Against Tomorrow.

Burroughs married Melissa Broome in 1950 and had two children. He died on November 12, 1992, at the Bronx Veterans Administration Hospital at the age of eighty-one.