The Early Years
Alexander Scourby was born in Brooklyn, New York on. November 13, 1913 to Constantine Nicholas and Betsy (Patsakos) Scourby, both of whom were immigrants from Greece. His father was a successful restaurateur and wholesale baker and an ill-advised investor in some motion-picture failures.
Reared in Brooklyn, New York Scourby was a member of a Boy Scout troop there and later a cadet with the 101st National Guard Cavalry Regiment. He attended public and private schools in Brooklyn, spending his summer vacations in New Jersey, upstate New York and at a cousin's home in Massachusetts. Dismissed from Polytechnic Prep School, he finished his secondary education at Brooklyn Manual Training High School, which he described as "an ordinary high school that had an awful lot of shop."
As an adolescent, Scourby, who was co-editor of the magazine and yearbook at Manual Training High School, envisioned a career in writing. But he came to realize, as he has said, that writing was for him "absolutely the most painful thing in. the world" and that he "could never meet a deadline," whereas he found the reading aloud of plays easy and enjoyable. Encouraged by some of his teachers, he began to turn his attention to acting. He made his stage debut with the high school's dramatic society, as the juvenile in Augustin MacHugh's – “The Meanest Man in the World”.
When he graduated from high school in 1931, Scourby, not yet having abandoned the idea of a writing career, entered West Virginia University at Morgantown, West Virginia to study journalism. During his first semester at West Virginia he joined the campus drama group and played a character role in A. A. Milne's comedy “Mr. Pim Passes By”. In February 1932, as he was beginning his second semester, his father died, and he left the university to help run the family's pie bakery in Brooklyn.
About a month after Scourby returned to Brooklyn, he was accepted as an apprentice at Eva Le Gallienne's Civic Repertory Theatre on 14th Street in downtown Manhattan. At the Civic Repertory he was taught dancing, speech, and make-up, and was given his first professional role, a walk-on in “Liliom”. In 1933 Scourby and other Civic Repertory apprentices joined together to form the Apprentice Theatre, which presented plays at the New School for Social Research in New York City during the 1933-34 season.
Scourby's first role on Broadway was that of the Player King in Leslie Howard's production of “Hamlet”, which opened at the Imperial Theatre on November 10, 1936 and went on tour after thirty-nine performances. Returning to New York and unemployment in the spring of 1937, Scourby was introduced to the American Foundation for the Blind's Talking Book program by Wesley Addy, a member of the Hamlet cast and Scourby's roommate on the tour, who was recording plays at the Foundation.
