Biography

b. 18 May 1931, Newtown, Massachusetts, USA. On the stage from an early age, Morse made his Broadway debut in Thornton Wilder’s The Matchmaker (1955). He was then in Say Darling (1958), Bob Merrill’s Take Me Along (1959), and How To Succeed In Business Without Really Trying (1961). Critical and audience acclaim had been steadily growing and for the latter production, in which he sang Frank Loesser’s ‘I Believe In You’, Morse won a Tony Award for Best Actor In A Musical. He also made some nightclub appearances as a comedian, including working at The Showplace, at 146 West 4th Street in New York’s West Village. Meanwhile, he had been making films, among them the screen adaptation of The Matchmaker (1958), The Cardinal (1963), Honeymoon Hotel (1964) and The Loved One (1965), and now made the film version of How To Succeed In Business Without Really Trying (1967). He made a few other films in these years, including Where Were You When The Lights Went Out? (1968) and The Boatniks (1970), but was also in stage productions including co-starring in Sugar (1972), a musical based on the 1959 film Some Like It Hot, and So Long, 174th Street (1976). In the 80s he was mostly in television but then appeared on Broadway as Truman Capote in the one-man comedy Tru (1989), for which he was awarded another Tony, this time for Best Actor In A Play. In the 90s and early 00s, he appeared in out-of-town productions of Show Boat (1994) and Wicked (2003). In these later years, Morse also sang in concert at various venues.