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Alexander Scourby

Alexander Scourby built a career that moved between stage, radio, film, television and voice work, but his gift for reading aloud became one of its defining threads. Born in Brooklyn on November 13, 1913, to Greek immigrant parents, he initially imagined becoming a writer. While attending Brooklyn Manual Training High School, however, he discovered that performing plays came more naturally and made his stage debut with the school’s dramatic society. Scourby entered West Virginia University to study journalism in 1931 and joined its campus drama group. After his father died in 1932, he left the university and returned home to help run the family bakery. Soon afterward, he was accepted as an apprentice at Eva Le Gallienne’s Civic Repertory Theatre in Manhattan, where he studied speech, dance and make-up. His first professional role was a walk-on in Liliom. His Broadway debut followed in 1936, when he played the Player King in Leslie Howard’s production of Hamlet. Scourby also appeared as the spirit of Hamlet’s father in a CBS Columbia Workshop broadcast directed by Orson Welles that year. By the early 1940s, he had regular parts in several radio serials, including Against the Storm, and his voice was heard on dramatic programs such as The Eternal Light. He also voiced Superman’s father, Jor-El, in an origin episode of The Adventures of Superman. A 1937 audition for the American Foundation for the Blind’s Talking Book program opened another major path. Scourby went on to record important books, including the Bible, and later described his recordings for blind listeners as perhaps his greatest achievement. During the Second World War, he also made Greek- and English-language broadcasts for the Office of War Information. Across his varied work, Scourby’s career shows how an actor’s voice can become as central as any face on a screen.