Adrian Morris was the son of prominent Broadway actors William Morris and Etta Hawkins, and the younger brother of stage and film star Chester Morris. Adrian launched his own film career in 1931, spending the next decade playing minor roles as cops, sheriffs, gangsters, and the like. He played the loquacious carpetbagger who promised a gathering of freed slaves that they'd each receive "40 acres and a mule" in Gone With the Wind (1939), and was seen as the heartless hiring agent who delivers impossible ultimatums to the transient "Okies" in The Grapes of Wrath (1940). Adrian Morris died unexpectedly at the age of 38.