Filmmaker Warren Beatty and Mervyn's Mervin Morris Join TSRI Board

Actor and Academy Award-winning director and producer Warren Beatty and California businessman Mervin G. Morris, the founder of the Mervyn's chain of retail stores, have been elected to the Board of Trustees of The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI).

"We're very proud to welcome Warren Beatty and Mervin Morris as the newest members of our Board of Trustees," says TSRI President Richard Lerner. "They both bring to the Board a unique set of insights, experience, and skills."

Business and philanthropic leader Mervin Morris is a third generation Californian who was raised in the farming town of Delano, California where his parents ran a small retail store. He joined the family business after World War II, having served four years in the U.S. Army where he rose to the rank of captain.

Morris founded Mervyn's stores in San Lorenzo, California, in 1949. Mervyn's evolved from a single store with two employees to a company with sales in excess of $4 billion a year employing approximately 70,000 people nationwide. Morris was chairman and chief executive officer of Mervyn's, now a division of Target Corporation, until 1979. He is currently chairman of Morris Management Company, a family investment firm, and serves as a trustee for the Palo Alto Medical Foundation and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

He is former chairman of the National Retail Merchants Association, and has served on the Boards of Directors of several large companies. In addition, he has been a trustee for a number of non-profit organizations, including the Boys & Girls Clubs of America, the University of Southern California, the California Academy of Sciences, the Eisenhower Medical Center, Mt. Zion Hospital of San Francisco, and Stanford Hospital & Clinics.

Warren Beatty is one of the top actors, directors, film writers, and producers in the world. He is the recipient of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' highest honor, the Irving G. Thalberg Award and nominated for 15 Oscars for acting, directing, writing and producing. The eight pictures he has produced have won a total of 53 nominations. He has won the highest honors from the Producers Guild of America, The Directors Guild of America, The Writers Guild of America, the New York, the Los Angeles and the National Society of Film Critics and has been made a Commander of the Arts and Letters in France, A Fellow of The British Academy and has been awarded the David de Donatello in Italy.

He won the Academy Award for directing Reds, which was nominated for 12 Academy Awards, four of which went to Beatty himself – Best Actor, Best Original Screenplay. Best Director and Best Picture. Only two other times in movie history has one individual been nominated in four categories for a single movie: Orson Welles for Citizen Kane (1941), and Beatty again for Heaven Can Wait.

A politically active Democrat since the 1960's, Beatty participates in the World Economic Forum at Davos, Switzerland, is a founding Board Member of The Progressive Majority and a founding board member of The Center For National Policy. He has received the Eleanor Roosevelt Award from Americans for Democratic Action and the Brennan Legacy Award from The Brennan Center for Justice at The New York University School of Law.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


"We're very proud to welcome Warren Beatty and Mervin Morris as the newest members of our Board of Trustees. They both bring to the Board a unique set of insights, experience, and skills."

—Richard Lerner