Eric Burroughs
| Eric Burroughs | |
|---|---|
 |
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| Born |
November 6, 1911 The Bronx, New York City, New York |
| Died | November 12, 1992 (aged 81) The Bronx, New York City, New York |
| Occupation | Actor |
Eric Burroughs (November 6, 1911 – November 12, 1992) was an American stage and radio actor whose career spanned the 1930s to the early 1960s. He appeared in Orson Welles's all-Black Federal Theatre Project production of Macbeth. Burroughs was later lauded by radio giant Norman Corwin as being "the finest Negro actor in radio."
Eric Burroughs was born in The Bronx, New York on November 6, 1911. He was the son of postal worker and Shakespearean reader Charles Burroughs and Williana Burroughs, a New York City public school teacher and Communist party activist.
In the late 1920s, after graduating from high school at the age of 16, Burroughs secured a minor role in the production Harlem, at the Apollo Theatre, starring Isabelle Washington, which ran for six months. His parents, however, wanted him to have a profession, and sent him to Germany to study political science. Instead, he quit after two weeks and enrolled in the Kammerspiele School of the Theatre, Hamburg, run by theatrical producer and director Erwin Piscator, regarded as the foremost exponent of "Epic Theater," a form that emphasized the socio-political content of drama. Burroughs appeared in a Piscator production of The Good Soldier Schweik, as well as various Shakespeare plays including The Merchant of Venice. In 1930 he attended the International Theatre Conference in Hamburg, where he met Tairoff, the director of the Kamerny Theatre, Moscow, and since his mother and brothers were already in the USSR, he accepted Tairoff's invitation to visit the USSR, where he stayed for six months. Returning to Germany, he launched a career in theatre and film. He remained until two weeks after Hitler came to power in 1933, then returned to New York.
Burroughs's German wife, Lotte Manshardt, followed him to New York and they attempted to start an independent theater company called Theater Mass. When this did not succeed, Manshardt returned to Germany in 1935.
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