John Barrymore

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This article is about John Barrymore, Sr. For his son John Barrymore, Jr., see John Drew Barrymore.
John Barrymore

John Barrymore (aged 40) (1922)
Born John Sidney Blyth
February 15, 1882(1882-02-15)
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Died May 29, 1942 (aged 60)
Los Angeles, California
Spouse(s) Katherine Corri Harris (1910-1917)
Blanche Oelrichs (1920-1928)
Dolores Costello (1928-1934)
Elaine Barrie (1936-1940)

John Sidney Blyth Barrymore (February 15, 1882 – May 29, 1942), was an American actor, frequently called the greatest of his generation. He first gained fame as a stage actor, lauded for his portrayals of Hamlet and Richard III. His success continued with motion pictures in both the silent and sound eras. His classic nose and distinguished features won him the nickname "The Great Profile".

A member of a multi-generation theatrical dynasty, he was the brother of Lionel Barrymore and Ethel Barrymore, and the grandfather of Drew Barrymore.

Contents

[edit] Background

Barrymore was born into an illustrious theatrical family. His parents were Maurice Barrymore and Georgiana Drew. His maternal grandmother was Louisa Lane Drew (aka Mrs Drew), a prominent and well-respected 19th century actress and theater manager, who instilled in John, his sister Ethel and brother Lionel the ways of acting and theatre life. His uncles were John Drew Jr. and Sidney Drew.

John fondly remembered the summer of 1896 in his youth spent on his father's rambling farm on Long Island. He and Lionel lived a Robinson Crusoe-like existence, attended by a black cook named Edward . He was expelled from Georgetown Preparatory School in 1898 after being caught patronizing a bordello. He was a hard-drinking adventurer with a jaunty personality.

While still a teenager, he courted showgirl Evelyn Nesbit in 1901 and 1902. When Nesbit became pregnant -- she aged 17 and he 19 -- Barrymore proposed marriage. But her "sponsor" Stanford White intervened, and arranged for the still-teenaged Evelyn to undergo an operation for "appendicitis". White was later murdered by Nesbit's vengeful husband, Pittsburgh millionaire Harry K. Thaw.

He was staying at the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco when the 1906 earthquake struck. He had starred in a production of The Dictator and was booked to tour Australia with it. Since he loathed this prospect, he hid, spending the next few days drinking at the home of a friend on Van Ness Avenue. During his drinking jag, he worked out a plan to exploit the earthquake for his own ends. He decided to present himself as an on-the-scene "reporter", making up vitually everything he claimed to have witnessed. Twenty years later, Barrymore finally confessed to his deception, but by then, he was so famous that the world merely smiled indulgently at his admission."[1] His account was written as a "letter to my sister Ethel". He was sure the letter would be "worth at least a hundred dollars." In terms of publicity it earned Barrymore a thousand times that amount.[1]

[edit] Early theater and film career

Barrymore delivered some of the most critically acclaimed performances in theatre and cinema history and was regarded by many as the screen's greatest performer during a movie career spanning 25 years as a leading man in more than 60 films.

He specialized in trivial comedies until creating a sensation in John Galsworthy's Justice (1916). He followed this triumph up with Broadway successes in Peter Ibbetson (1917), a role his father Maurice had wanted to play, and The Jest (1919), co-starring his brother Lionel, reaching what seemed to be the zenith of his career as Richard III in 1920. Barrymore had a conspicuous failure in his wife Michael Strange's strange play Clair de Lune (1921), but followed it with the greatest success of his career with Hamlet in 1920 which he played on Broadway for 101 performances and then took to London in 1925.

His silent-film roles included A.J. Raffles in Raffles the Amateur Cracksman (1917), Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1920), Sherlock Holmes (1922), Beau Brummel (1924), The Sea Beast (1926, as Captain Ahab), and Don Juan (1926). When talking pictures arrived, Barrymore's stage-trained voice added a new dimension to his work. He made his talkie debut with a dramatic reading from Henry VI in Warner Brothers' musical revue The Show of Shows, and reprised his Captain Ahab role in Moby-Dick (1930). His other leads included The Man from Blankley's (1930), Svengali (1931), The Mad Genius (1931), Grand Hotel (1932) (in which he displays an affectionate chemistry with his brother Lionel), Dinner at Eight (1933), Topaze (1933) and Twentieth Century (1934). He worked opposite many of the screen's foremost leading ladies, including Greta Garbo, Katharine Hepburn, Joan Crawford, and Carole Lombard. In 1933, Barrymore appeared as a Jewish attorney in the title role of Counsellor-at-Law based on Elmer Rice's 1931 play. As critic Pauline Kael later wrote, he "seems an unlikely choice for the ghetto-born lawyer...but this is one of the few screen roles that reveal his measure as an actor. His 'presence' is apparent in every scene; so are his restraint, his humor, and his zest."

[edit] Later career

In the late 1930s, alcoholism and possibly Alzheimer's Disease encroached on his ability to remember his lines, and his diminished abilities were apparent in an surviving screen test that he made for an aborted film of Hamlet in 1934. From then on, he insisted on reading his dialogue from cue cards. He continued to give creditable performances in lesser pictures, for example as Inspector Nielson in some of Paramount Pictures' Bulldog Drummond mysteries, and offered one last bravura dramatic turn in RKO's 1939 feature The Great Man Votes. After that, his remaining screen roles were broad caricatures of himself, as in The Great Profile (with a demeaning choice of theme music: "Oh, Johnny, How You Can Love") and World Premiere. In the otherwise undistinguished Playmates with bandleader Kay Kyser, the failing Barrymore recited the Hamlet soliloquy with care and conviction. In 1937, Barrymore visited India, the land where his father had been born. In his private life, during his last years, he was married to his fourth and last wife, Elaine Barrie, which turned out to be disastrous. His brother Lionel tried to help John find a small place near himself and to convince John to stay away from impetuous marriages which usually ended in divorce and put a strain on his once-large income.

He was known for calling people by nicknames of his own creation. Dolores Costello was known in his writing alternately as "Small Cat," "Catkiwee," "Winkie", and "Egg." He called Lionel "Mike", and Ethel called John "Jake". He was fond of sailing, and owned his own yacht, The Mariner, on which he could escape unhappy wives, mistresses, lawyers, and creditors.

[edit] Death

Barrymore collapsed while appearing on a radio show and died some days later in his hospital room. His dying words were "Die? I should say not, dear fellow. No Barrymore would allow such a conventional thing to happen to him." Gene Fowler attributes different dying words to Barrymore in his biography Good Night, Sweet Prince. According to Fowler, John Barrymore roused as if to say something to his brother Lionel; Lionel asked John to repeat himself, and John simply replied, "You heard me, Mike."

According to Errol Flynn's memoirs, film director Raoul Walsh "borrowed" Barrymore's body after the funeral, and left his corpse propped in a chair for a drunken Flynn to discover when he returned home from The Cock and Bull Bar. This was re-created in the movie W.C. Fields and Me. Other accounts of this classic Hollywood tale substitute actor Peter Lorre in the place of Walsh, but Raoul Walsh himself tells the story in Richard Schickel's 1973 documentary The Men Who Made the Movies.

[edit] Legacy

For his contribution to the motion picture industry, John Barrymore has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6667 Hollywood Boulevard.

Barrymore had been a friend and contemporary (and drinking buddy) of his fellow Philadelphian W. C. Fields. In the 1976 film W.C. Fields and Me, Barrymore was played by Jack Cassidy. He was also portrayed by Christopher Plummer in the 1996 one-man show Barrymore.

He is mentioned in the lyrics of the song I May Be Wrong (But I Think You're Wonderful) by Harry Sullivan and Harry Ruskin, written in 1929, which became the theme song of the Apollo Theater in New York, and which was recorded by many artists including Doris Day in 1950. The line is "You might be John Barrymore", meaning that you might be someone wonderful (it is a love song).

[edit] Marriages

  1. Katherine Corri Harris (1891-1927), an actress who starred in the 1918 film The House of Mirth, on September 1, 1910 and divorced in 1917 .
  2. Blanche Marie Louise Oelrichs (1890-1950), aka "Michael Strange," on August 5, 1920 and divorced her in 1925 . They had one child:
  3. Dolores Costello (1903-1979), actress and model best known for Little Lord Fauntleroy (1936) & The Magnificent Ambersons(1941); they married on November 24, 1928 and divorced in 1935 . They had two children:
  4. Elaine Barrie (née Elaine Jacobs), (1916-2003), an actress; married November 9, 1936 and divorced 1940

[edit] Quotations

  • "Why is there so much month left at the end of the money?"
  • "A man is not old until regrets take the place of dreams."
  • On the subject of theatre reviews: "Actors should never read them. If you don't believe the bad ones, why should you pay attention to the good ones?" said to John Carradine, who was performing in If I Were King at the Philharmonic Theatre in Los Angeles.[2]

[edit] References

  1. ^ a b Gordon Thomas and Max Morgan Witts: The San Francisco Earthquake, Stein and Day, New York and Souvenir Press, London, 1971; reprinted Dell, 1972, SBN 440-07631, page 212
  2. ^ Fowler, Gene: Good Night, Sweet Prince (Viking Press, 1944; page 463)

[edit] See also

[edit] References

  • Good Night, Sweet Prince (1944) by Gene Fowler
  • The New Book of Lists by David Wallechinsky & Amy Wallace
  • The First Male Stars: Men of the Silent Era by David W. Menefee.

[edit] External links

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