Alexander Scourby (; November 13, 1913 – February 22, 1985) was an American film, television, and voice actor and narrator known for his deep and resonant voice and Mid-Atlantic accent. He is best known for his film role as the ruthless mob boss Mike Lagana in Fritz Lang's The Big Heat (1953), and is also particularly well-remembered in the English-speaking world for his landmark recordings of the entire King James Version audio Bible, which have been released in numerous editions. He later recorded the entire Revised Standard Version of the Bible. Scourby was an accomplished narrator, including for 18 episodes of National Geographic Specials from 1966 to 1985 (almost twice as many as any of its other narrators). Scourby recorded 422 audiobooks for the blind, which he considered his most important work. During World War II, Scourby's broadcasts were beamed abroad in Greek and English for the Office of War Information. At the time, a writer in Variety (May 16, 1962) described the quality of Scourby's voice as "the kind of resonance closely associated by listeners with big time radio."

Theater and film work

Scourby kept his hand in the theater by doing summer stock and a wide variety of other seasonal productions. In Maurice Evans' production of 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 1 as the Earl of Westmoreland. The following year, he toured with Evans in Richard II as one of the hirelings of the king. He returned to Broadway years later in late 1946, replacing Ruth Chatterton as the narrator in Ben Hecht's A Flag Is Born, a one-act, dramatic pageant in which Marlon Brando had one of his early stage roles. The play was 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. He was a co-founder of New Stages, a drama company that went into operation in a small theater on Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village during the 1947–48 season. During its two-year existence, the company presented works by such artists as Federico García Lorca (Blood Wedding), Edward Caulfield (Bruno and Sidney), and two plays by Jean-Paul Sartre.

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 Ivanoff, 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 Hagen 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.

thumb|Scourby and [[Ernest Borgnine in Man on a String]] Scourby first appeared on screen opposite Glenn Ford in Affair in Trinidad (Columbia, 1952) and The Big Heat (Columbia, 1953). He appeared again with Glenn Ford in Ransom! (MGM, 1956), later to be remade with Mel Gibson and Gary Sinise. Scourby played Dr. Mikhail Andrassy in The Shaggy Dog (1959). "None of the pictures I've done have been really important or very good", Scourby later said, "with the exception—and it is debatable—of Giant (Warner Brothers, 1956)". In the film version of Edna Ferber's novel Scourby played Polo, the old Mexican ranch foreman. He later had roles in The Big Fisherman (Buena Vista, 1959), Seven Thieves (1960), Man on a String (1960), The Devil at 4 O'Clock (1961) and The Executioner (1970). During these extremely busy years, Scourby, who had been living with his wife and child in an apartment near Columbia University in New York City, 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 Siobhán 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...", critic Norman Nadel wrote in his review 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". Shortly 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 Jeanette Nolan for forty performances, beginning on January 10, 1964.

In the early 1950s, Scourby worked in television as both a narrator and actor. One of his continuing assignments was as narrator for NBC's Project 20 public affairs specials. He narrated a ninety-minute condensation of the television series, Victory at Sea, for Project 20 in 1954. Other Project 20 assignments were in regard to the atomic bomb, and three religious documentaries using great paintings to tell the Bible story: The Coming of Christ (at Christmas); He Is Risen (at Easter); and The Law and Prophets of the Old Testament. Audio from The Coming of Christ, with orchestrations by Robert Russell Bennett, was released by Decca Records in 1960 to popular acclaim.

In 1965, he narrated the Youngstown Sheet and Tube sponsored films, Search. The film won a CINE (Council on International Nontheatrical Events) Golden Eagle Award in 1964. It was selected for entry into international film festivals in Venice and Edinburgh.

Scourby replaced Sean Connery as narrator of the television special The Incredible World of James Bond, originally broadcast by NBC in 1965. He narrated the 1965 United States Navy documentary Pacific Frontier.

As a television actor, Scourby had roles on Playhouse 90, Circle Theatre, and Studio One. He refused to tie himself down to a series, because, as he explained, "it's hard to do good things that way." He took occasional parts in westerns such as Wanted: Dead or Alive, Bonanza, and The Rifleman, as well as Mr. Novak, Daniel Boone, The Asphalt Jungle, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., The Defenders, and other set-format dramatic shows. Most of the filmed shows were produced in California. In 1972, he joined his wife, Lori March, on The Secret Storm, on which he played the second Dr. Ian Northcoate (March played his wife, Valerie Lake Ames Northcoate), until that show was cancelled in 1974. He later played Nigel Fargate on All My Children In the Twilight Zone episode, "The Last Flight", he played General Harper.

In character as James Bond, Scourby narrated the controversial television re-edit of the 1969 Bond film On Her Majesty's Secret Service broadcast by ABC in two parts in February 1976.

Audio recordings

Scourby read 422 books for the Talking Books program of the American Foundation for the Blind, including Homer's Iliad, Tolstoy's War and Peace, Joyce's Ulysses, Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury.

Personal life and death

Scourby and Lori von Eltz were married on May 12, 1943. Von Eltz was the daughter of motion-picture actor Theodor von Eltz, and was well known as the actress Lori March. The couple had a daughter, Alexandra, born on March 27, 1944.

Scourby had no political affiliation nor any specific religious affiliations, though he was baptized in the Greek Orthodox tradition and his marriage to von Eltz occurred in an Episcopal chapel.

Scourby died of a heart attack on February 22, 1985, in Newtown, Connecticut, aged 71. His widow died in 2013, aged 90.

Filmography

  • With These Hands (1950) – Doctor (uncredited)
  • Affair in Trinidad (1952) – Max Fabian
  • Because of You (1952) – Dr. Breen
  • The Redhead from Wyoming (1953) – Reece Duncan
  • The Glory Brigade (1953) – Lieutenant Niklas
  • The Big Heat (1953) – Mike Lagana
  • Sign of the Pagan (1954) – Chrysaphius
  • The Silver Chalice (1954) – Luke
  • Ransom! (1956) – Dr. Paul Y. Gorman
  • Studio One
  • "Emmaline" (1956) - Edward
  • "A Special Announcement" (1956) - Narrator
  • "A Walk in the Forest" (1957) - Prof. Tom Monev
  • "The Night America Trembled" (1957) - Carl Phillips
  • Giant (1956) – Old Polo
  • Me and the Colonel (1958) – Major Von Bergen
  • The Shaggy Dog (1959) – Dr. Mikhail Andrassy
  • The Big Fisherman (1959) – David Ben-Zadok
  • Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1960) (Season 6 Episode 10: "Sybilla") - Horace Meade
  • Seven Thieves (1960) – Raymond Le May
  • Man on a String (1960) – Colonel Vadja Kubelov
  • The Devil at 4 O'Clock (1961) – The Governor
  • Gendarme in New York (1965)
  • Ready on Arrival, the USS Independence in Vietnam (1966)
  • Year 1999 A.D. (1967) - Narrator
  • America In Space - The First Decade (1968) – Narrator (voice)
  • The Executioner (1970) – Professor Parker
  • Jesus (1979) – Luke (voice)
  • Strange But True (1981)
  • Merton (1984) – Narrator (voice)
  • The Stuff (1985) – Evans (final film role)

References

  • Alexander Scourby papers, 1940-1989, held by the Billy Rose Theatre Division, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts
  • Ballantine Beer ad (voiceover by Alexander Scourby)