Lori March Scourby Headshot - P 2013
Everett CollectionLori March Scourby, an actress known as the “First Lady of Daytime Television” for her decades of work in serials who also starred in a memorable episode of The Twilight Zone, has died. She was 90.
The wife of the late Alexander Scourby, an actor and narrator of numerous audiobooks including the King James Bible, died in her sleep March 19. No other details of her death were immediately available.
Scourby played Valerie Hill Ames Northcoate on CBS’ The Secret Storm from 1964-74 (Alexander played her husband for a couple of years on the show) and appeared on other soaps including The Brighter Day, Search for Tomorrow, One Life to Live, The Edge of Night, Texas, Guiding Light and Another World.
On “Third From the Sun,” an episode of The Twilight Zone that aired in January 1960, Scourby played the wife of Fritz Weaver’s character. They and another couple on a military base plot to steal a spaceship to escape the planet’s imminent nuclear war.
Scourby was born in Hollywood on March 6, 1923, to actor Theodore Von Eltz (Topper, Bright Eyes) and screenwriter Peggy Prior. She attended Beverly Hills High School and moved to New York in 1939 to study acting, eventually appearing in such Broadway shows as Jose Ferrer’s Cyrano de Bergerac, Charley’s Aunt and The Chalk Garden.
She and Alexander married in May 1943. Her husband, who also narrated a feature-length version of the NBC documentary series Victory at Sea and recorded more than 300 works of literature for the blind, died in 1985 at age 71. His resonant recording of the King James Bible was made in 1950s and remains a big seller.
