Alexander Scourby (; November 13, 1913 – February 22, 1985) was an American film, television, and voice actor 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 recorded 422 audiobooks for the blind which he considered his most important work. Early life 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 of whom were immigrants from Greece. Reared in Brooklyn, Scourby was a member of a Boy Scout troop and later became a cadet with the 101st National Guard Cavalry Regiment. He attended public and private schools in Brooklyn, spending 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." He was a co-editor of the school magazine and yearbook, and he envisioned a career in writing, though he later came to realize that writing was, for him, "absolutely the most painful thing in the world" and also 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. Early career Upon graduation from high school in 1931, Scourby, not yet having abandoned the prospect of a writing career, entered West Virginia University at Morgantown to study journalism. During his first semester he joined the campus drama group and played a minor 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. A month after Scourby returned