Four generations of this unique family have been actors, and three of its members from the second generation, siblings John, Lionel, and Ethel, have had significant movie careers. While the Barrymore name is legend in the theater, it enjoys less renown in Hollywood circles. But while the theater saw the best of the Barrymores, the movies still caught a considerable amount of their talent, charm, and style. Maurice Barrymore (born Herbert Blythe) and Georgiana Drew were famous actors during their heyday on the American stage in the late 19th century. They gave birth to three children, Lionel (Blythe) Barrymore (1878–1954), Ethel (Blythe) Barrymore (1879–1959), and John (Blythe) Barrymore (1882–1942).
John Barrymore is the most famous of his three siblings, and rightfully so. He had a prodigious talent that was barely captured on screen. Yet this youngest member of the famous acting family originally rejected the theater to become a cartoonist. Eventually, however, he returned to the family business, making his stage debut in 1903 in a play called Magda. The handsome actor, who later became known as both “The Great Profile” and “The Great Lover,” was one of the most admired stage idols of his day, starring during the next 25 years in such plays as The Affairs of Anatol, Peter Ibbetson, The Jest, and Richard III. He was considered one of the great Hamlets, and he even played the melancholy Dane in England, one of the few American actors ever to dare act the role in the home of the Bard.
During the period of his greatest theatrical acclaim, Barrymore starred in silent films with modest success despite being robbed of his greatest gift, his magnificent speaking voice. His first film was An American Citizen (1913), and he ultimately appeared in more than 20 silent movies, his most notable being the original film version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1920), in which he used no makeup, relying totally on facial contortions to turn himself into the hideous monster, Mr. Hyde. It was a bravura performance that still amazes to this day.
When the movies learned to talk, Barrymore found himself in great demand, earning in excess of $30,000 per week. Though he was past his prime and suffering from the effects of decades of heavy drinking, he did manage a handful of exquisite performances. In Grand Hotel (1932) he was the epitome of the debonair but melancholy jewel thief. In Counsellor- at-Law (1933) he lent a finely wrought intensity and a rich humanity to his role of a Jewish attorney who had fought his way out of the slums. He was utterly brilliant, almost uncontainable, in Hollywood’s first screwball comedy, Twentieth Century (1934). The best of his other performances were usually parodies of his own well-documented dissolution, such as his painfully realistic portrayal of the drunken, failed actor in Dinner at Eight (1933).
With health fading from alcohol abuse, he found himself increasingly unable to remember his lines. Forced to use cue cards, he stumbled his way through many of his later movies. With his drawing power fading at the box office, Barrymore was reduced in the later 1930s to appearing in “B” MOVIEs, often in supporting roles. His last film was Playmates (1941). He died the following year, thoroughly broke.
John’s brother, Lionel, was never the great star that his brother had been, but he worked far more steadily and successfully in the movies than John did. Lionel took the new moving picture medium far more seriously than either of his siblings. He became involved with the movies as early as 1909 when he joined the Biograph studio and appeared in a good many of D. W. GRIFFITH’s early masterpieces, such as The Musketeers of Pig Alley (1912) and Judith of Bethulia (1914). Lionel also wrote scripts and directed a number of silent films. Though he was successful on the stage, Lionel began to work exclusively in the movies as of the mid-1920s, making solid, credible, but generally ordinary, films. It wasn’t until sound arrived in Hollywood that he emerged as one of the industry’s premier CHARACTER ACTORS, winning a Best Actor Oscar for his rousing performance as a clever criminal lawyer whose daughter falls in love with the gangster he’s just helped to acquit in A Free Soul (1931).
Barrymore was perhaps best known in the late 1930s and 1940s as Dr. Gillespie, playing the older physician throughout all 15 movies in the Dr. Kildare series. It was the kind of role he was best at playing—everyone’s kindly but crusty old uncle. And yet he also excelled at portraying parsimonious, nasty old men, which he did to perfection in It’s a Wonderful Life (1946). From 1938 until his death, the actor was confined to a wheelchair, the result of severe arthritis coupled with a leg injury. But it rarely stopped him from acting. His last appearance was in Main Street to Broadway in 1953; he died the following year.
Ethel outlived both of her brothers, rivaling John as a Broadway star in her early years and later rivaling Lionel as a character actor in her later years. She was known as “The First Lady of the American Theater” in her prime, but she followed in her brothers’ footsteps, dabbling in silent films beginning in 1914 with The Nightingale. She starred in a dozen silent movies over the next five years, finally giving her full attention back to the stage in 1919. She made but one movie during the 1930s, but it was a dandy, Rasputin and the Empress (1933), in which she played the czarina. She was joined in this film by her two brothers, the only time all three siblings starred in the same movie.
After another long stretch on the boards, Ethel came back to Hollywood in 1944 and immediately won an Oscar as Best Supporting Actress for her performance as Cary Grant’s dying mother in None but the Lonely Heart. From then on, she worked steadily in Hollywood in character roles, appearing in a considerable number of fine films such as The Spiral Staircase (1946), The Paradine Case (1948), Pinky (1949), and The Story of Three Loves (1953). Her last film was Johnny Trouble (1957). She died in 1960.
The next generation of Barrymores didn’t fare very well, either in life or in their film careers. Diana Barrymore, born Diana Blanche Blythe Barrymore (1921–1960), the daughter of John and his one-time wife, poet Michael Strange, appeared in a half-dozen undistinguished films between 1942 and 1944. She is perhaps better known as the author of Too Much, Too Soon, which told of her troubled life as the daughter of “The Great Profile.” The book was turned into a movie in 1957 starring Errol Flynn (in a bit of inspired typecasting) as her father.
Diana’s half-brother, John Drew Barrymore, was born John Blythe Barrymore Jr. (1932– ) to John Sr. and actress Delores Costello. He fared somewhat better in life than his half-sister did, but he, too, had a disappointing film career. Billed as John Barrymore Jr., he appeared in his first film, The Sundowners, in 1950. But a constantly flaring temper ruined his career in the mid-1950s. Later, as John Drew Barrymore, he worked largely in Europe in the late 1950s and early 1960s, then picked up small parts in American films during the 1970s.
Yet another generation of the Barrymore acting dynasty took to the screen in the early 1980s when John Drew Barrymore’s little daughter, Drew Barrymore (1975– ), was featured in STEVEN SPIELBERG’s smash hit, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982). She followed that success with a far more substantial role as a 10-year-old child suing her parents for divorce in Irreconcilable Differences (1984). The pressure of sudden success, however, took its toll. She admitted to alcohol addiction at the age of 13 but eventually recovered. Since 1990 she has made more than 30 films.
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