Great dynasties of the world: The Barrymores
Great dynasties of the world: The Barrymores
On Monday 15 November, 1954, at 7.15pm, Lionel Barrymore – star of more than 200 movies – died in hospital of a heart attack. According to Margot Peters, in her biography of the Barrymore family, The House of Barrymore (1990), on that same day a memo was sent at the MGM studios where Barrymore had been a contract star for 25 years, immediately reassigning his dressing room to James Cagney. The show had to go on. Barrymore would have understood: he was from a family of theatrical troupers, perhaps the most famous the world has known.
Lionel's father was Herbert Blythe. Born in India, educated in England, Herbert arrived in the US in 1874 meaning to become an actor. He took the stage name Maurice Barrymore, and was soon starring on Broadway. In 1876, he married the actor Georgiana Drew, whose parents and siblings were all actors. Herbert and Georgiana had three children – Lionel, Ethel and John. Ethel always said she wanted to be a pianist. Lionel and John wanted to become artists. They all went into acting. It became the family profession.
Ethel was probably the greatest actor among them. She had talent and she had swish. She had an imperial air. She wrote short stories and plays. She loved Henry James and had a fabulous upswept hairdo that everyone tried to copy. It's said that she turned down an offer of marriage from Winston Churchill. She was certainly formidable – a grande dame even when young. Her catchphrase at curtain calls was, "That's all there is – there isn't any more!" Katharine Hepburn remarked: "She fascinated everyone ... It's what you imagine as a child it would be like to meet somebody absolutely fascinating. Then when you meet them it usually isn't. But with Ethel Barrymore it was much more fascinating than I can possibly describe." (You can see her fascinating, even in a minor role, and aged 65, in the 1946 film The Spiral Staircase, in which she plays the bedridden stepmother of a psychopathic killer, and steals the movie.)
If Ethel was the matriarch, Lionel was the faithful old stager of the family – turning up, doing the job, moving on to the next role. He was a character actor and an old-fashioned bellower, and is probably now best and most appropriately remembered as mean old Mr Potter in Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life (1946). John, meanwhile, was the alcoholic and the wit. He married four times. His greatest film role was perhaps in George Cukor's 1933 movie Dinner at Eight, in which he plays a louche, washed-up alcoholic silent movie star.
In 1927, the Barrymore siblings received the ultimate critical accolade – a thinly disguised play about their lives opened on Broadway. Ethel was offended and consulted her lawyers. John thought the whole thing a great joke. The play was by George S Kaufman and Edna Ferber. It was called The Royal Family.
Sooner and later the Barrymores had children. John's daughter with his second wife was Diana Barrymore. Like her father, she became an actor. And an alcoholic. And a drug addict. Her autobiography was titled Too Much, Too Soon (1958). She killed herself in 1960. John Jr, like his father, married four times. And was also an alcoholic. And John Jr's daughter, Drew Barrymore, had serious drug and alcohol problems of her own in adolescence, before going on to establish a career as an actor, producer and director.
The Barrymores are clearly an extraordinary family, who could probably teach us a lot about the meaning of creativity and inheritance, except perhaps the central thing about creativity and inheritance, which is that it probably doesn't exist. Or if it does, not in the way we think. Ethel Barrymore's daughter liked to quote Goethe: "That which thy ancestors hath bequeathed, earn it again if thou wouldst possess it."
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2010/oct/02/drew-barrymore-hollywood-drugs-alcohol
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