31 Facts About Alexander Scourby

Alexander Scourby was an American film, television, and voice actor and narrator known for his deep and resonant voice and Mid-Atlantic accent.

Alexander Scourby is best known for his film role as the ruthless mob boss Mike Lagana in Fritz Lang's The Big Heat, and is 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.

Alexander Scourby later recorded the entire Revised Standard Version of the Bible.

Alexander Scourby recorded 422 audiobooks for the blind, which he considered his most important work.

Alexander Scourby was born in Brooklyn, New York, on November 13,1913, to Constantine Nicholas Scourby, a successful restaurateur, wholesale baker and sometime investor in independent motion-pictures, and Betsy Patsakos, a homemaker, both immigrants from Greece.

Alexander Scourby attended public and private schools in Brooklyn, spending summer vacations in New Jersey, Upstate New York, and at a cousin's home in Massachusetts.

Alexander Scourby is credited as Hamlet's father the King on the 19 September 1936 CBS radio program Columbia Workshop directed by Orson Welles, and by the early 1940s 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.

Alexander Scourby narrated Andre Kostelanetz' musical show for a year, using the pseudonym Alexander Scott.

Alexander Scourby kept his hand in the theater by doing summer stock and a wide variety of other seasonal productions.

Alexander Scourby 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.

In Sidney Kingsley's Detective Story, which opened at the Hudson Theatre on March 23,1949, and ran for a year and eight months, Alexander Scourby played Tami Giacoppetti, the tough racketeer.

Almost immediately after Detective Story closed, Alexander 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.

Alexander Scourby first appeared on screen opposite Glenn Ford in Affair in Trinidad and The Big Heat.

Alexander Scourby played Dr Mikhail Andrassy in The Shaggy Dog.

Alexander Scourby later had roles in The Big Fisherman, Seven Thieves, Man on a String, The Devil at 4 O'Clock and The Executioner.

Back on the New York stage, Alexander 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.

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.

Shortly after Tovarich closed, on November 9,1963, after 264 performances, Alexander 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.

Alexander Scourby narrated a ninety-minute condensation of the television series, Victory at Sea, for Project 20 in 1954.

Alexander Scourby replaced Sean Connery as narrator of the television special The Incredible World of James Bond, originally broadcast by NBC in 1965.

Alexander Scourby narrated the 1965 United States Navy documentary Pacific Frontier.

Alexander Scourby 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, Alexander 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.

Alexander 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.

Alexander Scourby made recordings for Spoken Arts and Listening Library.

Alexander Scourby narrated the documentary LP recording First Man on the Moon.

Alexander Scourby was the first person to record the King James Bible issued on long-play records in the 1950s.

Alexander Scourby originally narrated the Old and New Testament for the American Foundation for the Blind.

Alexander Scourby made recordings of British and American poetry, including A Golden Treasury of Poetry, an LP recorded for the children's label Golden Records.

Alexander 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.

Alexander Scourby died of a heart attack on February 22,1985, in Newtown, Connecticut, aged 71.