The Foundation
The American Foundation for the Blind offers to the 450 agencies concerned with the estimated 400,000 sightless persons in the United States more than 100 services that would be difficult or impossible for individual agencies to provide on their own. The Talking Book service was conceived by Dr. Robert B. lrwin, then executive director of the Foundation, after a survey in 1929 which revealed that only 15 percent of the sightless population was sufficiently skilled at touch reading to enjoy books in Braille. In 1934 an act of Congress authorized governmental financing of the project and the American Foundation for the Blind, under the supervision of the Library of Congress, began issuing readings of complete books by professional actors on long-playing records. As many as 500 Talking Books of fiction, nonfiction, drama and poetry were produced annually (partly by the AFB and partly by the American Printing House for the Blind, and distributed by the Library of Congress to thirty-two regional libraries serving nearly 80,000 blind borrowers.
The Talking Books that Scourby recorded for the blind number in the hundreds and range from the “Bible” and the "Iliad" to Gilbert "Highet's Talents" and "Geniuses". The majority of the recordings are novels, both contemporary, such as "Ship of Fools" and classic, such as "War and Peace" and "The Idiot". Besides his work for Talking Books, Scourby did readings for his own company, Lectern Records. Paraphrasing Gregory Ziemer, the director of public education at the American Foundation for the Blind, Kevin Wallace in the New Yorker (November 3, 1962) has said that Scourby "rates as high with Talking Book fans as Sinatra does with the popular-ballad public."
After auditioning at the American Foundation for the Blind in the spring of 1937, Scourby was cast in a small part in a recording of "Antony and Cleopatra". During the following summer he was again, the Player King in a production of "Hamlet" at Dennis, Massachusetts that featured Eva Le Gallienne in the title role. When he returned to the American Foundation for the Blind later in the year to record plays he was told that the company of actors was filled, but that he might record a novel if he wished. “That was the beginning of it," he said in scanning his career years later adding, "The recordings for the blind are perhaps my greatest achievement. Most of the things I look back at in the theater were either insignificant parts in great plays or good parts in terrible plays. So it really doesn't amount to anything, whereas I have recorded some great books." The greatest one being “The Bible”.
In Maurice Evans' "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 I as the Earl of Westmoreland and the following year he toured with Evans in King Richard II as one of the hirelings of the king.
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”. Scourby began working in radio in 1939 and by the early 1940's 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. He narrated the Andre Kostelanetz musical show for a year, using the pseudonym "Alexander Scott" at the request of the sponsors his voice was heard on many dramatic shows, including NBC's Sunday program "The Eternal Light" (with which he was to remain, despite heavy commitments elsewhere, through the 1950's). On Superman, his was the voice of the title character's father in the one program devoted to the prodigy's origins. During World War II Scourby did broadcasts beamed abroad in Greek and English for the Office of War Information.
Meanwhile Scourby had been keeping a hand in the theater by doing summer stock. He returned to Broadway in late 1946, replacing Ruth Chatterton as the narrator in Ben Hecht's "A Flag Is Born", a one-act: dramatic pageant 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, playing Razournikhim, friend to Gielgud's Raskolnikoff.
Scourby was one of the founders of New Stages, a drama company that went into operation in a small theater on Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village, New York City in the 1947/48 season. During its two-year existence, the company presented Garcia Lorca's “Blood Wedding”, Edward Caulfield's “Bruno and Sidney”, and two plays by Jean-Paul Sartre and “The Victors”.
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 lvanoff, 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 Hagcn 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.
Scourby's first motion-picture appearances were in two films with Glenn Ford, "Affair in Trinidad" (Columbia, 1952) and "The Big Heat" (Columbia, 1953). He subsequently played a Greek officer in Korea in "The Glory Brigade" (Twentieth Century-Fox, 1953) and a Biblical character in "The Silver Chalice" (Warner Brothers, 1959), and he again appeared with Glenn Ford in "Ransom" (MGM, 1956). "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." In "Giant" (Warner Brothers, 1956), the film version of Edna Ferber's novel that starred James Dean, Scourby played Polo, the old Mexican ranch foreman. He later had a role in "The Big Fisherman" (Buena Vista, 1959). During his flurry of motion-picture activity in the 1950's, Scourby, who had been living with his wife and child in an apartment near Columbia University in New York City for ten years, 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 Siobhan 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 . . . ," Norman Nadel observed 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. “Soon 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 Jeannette Nolan for forty performances beginning on January 10, 1964.
In the early 1950's Scourby worked in television as both a narrator and actor. One of his constant assignments as a narrator was the NBC-TV's Project 20 show. He narrated a ninety-minute condensation of the television series "Victory at Sea" for Project 20 in 1954. His assignments for the program included “Three, Two, One, Zero”, about the atomic bomb, and three religious documentaries using great paintings to tell the Bible story: "The Coming of Christ", a "Christmas show"; "He Is Risen", a "Easter show"; and The Law and Prophets of the Old Testament.
As a television actor Scourby has had major roles in dramas presented on such notable programs as Playhouse 90, Circle Theater, and Studio One. He refused to tie himself down to a series, because, as he has explained, "it's hard to do good things that way." He, however, accepted occasional parts in “Daniel Boone", “The Man from U.N.C.L.E.”, "The Defenders" and other set-format dramatic shows. Most of the filmed shows were made in California.
Partly to give himself more time on the East Coast, after 1960, he lent his voice to certain television commercials, notably those of Eastern Airlines and was the voice of choice of numerous Advertisers as a voice over for their commercials. Scourby became one of the highest paid voice over talents of his day and if advertises couldn’t get Scourby they would instruct their agents to get them a “Scourby voice”. He narrated numerous TV documentaries, including the highly proclaimed CBS TV series, "The Body Human". His voice until this very day is recognized as one of the best voices God ever created.
