Career
A New York native, Morris began working in the theater in the 1950s, appearing as an actor in a number of Broadway plays including a 1961 production of Daughter of Silence by Morris West and based on West's novel. He also appeared in Jennie, a 1963 musical starring Mary Martin. During that period, he worked as a television actor, making guest appearances on Naked City, The Honeymooners, Car 54, Where Are You?, WKRP in Cincinnati. He continued his television acting career through the 1990s, with guest roles on Cheers, Mad About You, NewsRadio and Frasier. He also directed episodes of Barney Miller, Fish, Diff'rent Strokes, Too Close for Comfort, Quincy, M.E. and Tony Orlando and Dawn, among other series.
In his theater work, Morris focused on directing from the early 1970s. One of his first major assignments was directing the touring production of Neil Simon's The Gingerbread Lady in 1972. All in all, he helmed hundreds of productions, on and off Broadway, on national tours and in regional theaters, directing legends such as Al Pacino, Jose Ferrer and Mickey Rooney.
In 1989, Morris accepted a job as artistic director of the Actors Alley theater in the San Fernando Valley. During his more than 10 years with the company, the eclectic program list featured works by George Bernard Shaw and Charles Dickens as well as modern plays, including Susan Sandler's Crossing Delancey, produced in partnership with the University of Judaism (now the American Jewish University). The Actors Alley moved into the historic El Portal Theatre in North Hollywood in 1995 and performed in a small space for several years until the main stage was renovated. Morris left the artistic director post in 2000.
Read more about this topic: Jeremiah Morris
Famous quotes containing the word career:
“Each of the professions means a prejudice. The necessity for a career forces every one to take sides. We live in the age of the overworked, and the under-educated; the age in which people are so industrious that they become absolutely stupid.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)
“Whether lawyer, politician or executive, the American who knows what’s good for his career seeks an institutional rather than an individual identity. He becomes the man from NBC or IBM. The institutional imprint furnishes him with pension, meaning, proofs of existence. A man without a company name is a man without a country.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)
““Never hug and kiss your children! Mother love may make your children’s infancy unhappy and prevent them from pursuing a career or getting married!” That’s total hogwash, of course. But it shows on extreme example of what state-of-the-art “scientific” parenting was supposed to be in early twentieth-century America. After all, that was the heyday of efficiency experts, time-and-motion studies, and the like.”
—Lawrence Kutner (20th century)