| Ethel Barrymore | |
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Ethel Barrymore, 1896, |
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| Born | Ethel Mae Blythe August 15, 1879 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S. |
| Died | June 18, 1959 (aged 79) Los Angeles, California, U.S. |
| Occupation | Actress |
| Years active | 1895–1957 |
| Spouse | Russel Griswold Colt (m. 1909–1923) (divorced) 3 children |
Ethel Barrymore (August 15, 1879 – June 18, 1959) was an American actress and a member of the Barrymore family of actors.[1]
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Ethel Barrymore was born Ethel Mae Blythe in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the second child of the actors Maurice Barrymore (whose real name was Herbert Blythe) and Georgiana Drew. Named after her father’s favorite character—Ethel in William Makepeace Thackeray’s The Newcomes—she was one of the twentieth century’s most elegant, beautiful and gifted actresses.
She was the sister of actors John Barrymore and Lionel Barrymore, the aunt of actor John Drew Barrymore, and the great-aunt of actress Drew Barrymore. She was also the niece of Broadway matinée idol John Drew Jr and early Vitagraph movie star Sidney Drew.
She spent her childhood in Philadelphia, and attended Roman Catholic schools there.
Ethel Barrymore was a highly regarded stage actress in New York City and a major Broadway performer. Many today consider her to be the greatest actress of her generation.
Her first appearance in Broadway was in 1895, in a play called The Imprudent Young Couple which starred her uncle John Drew, Jr. and Maude Adams. She appeared with Drew and Adams again in 1896 in Rosemary.
In 1897 Ethel went with William Gillette to London to play Miss Kittridge in Gillette's Secret Service. The play, Gillette’s greatest work, was a huge success, but Ethel remained pretty much beneath everyone's radar scopes until one night when the leading actress, Odette Taylor, became ill and went home, still dressed in her costume. Ethel was standing in the wings in her nurse’s costume when the theater manager told her she would have to replace Taylor, dressed as she was. Ethel protested that she didn’t know Ms. Taylor’s part, but she went out in her nurse’s uniform and carried the show. It was a splendid performance, and she was noticed.
She was about to return to the States with Gillette's troupe when Henry Irving and Ellen Terry offered her the role of Annette in The Bells. A full London tour was on and, before it was over, Ethel created, on New Years Day 1898, Euphrosine in Peter the Great at the Lyceum, the play having been written by Irving's son, Laurence. Men everywhere were smitten with Ethel, most notably young Winston Churchill, who asked her to marry him. Not wishing to be a politician's wife, she refused. Winston, several years later, married Clementine Hozier, a ravishing beauty who looked very much like Ethel, but Winston and Ethel remained friends until the end of her life. Their “romance” was their own little secret until his son let the cat out of the bag 63 years after it happened.[2]
After her big season in London, Ethel returned to America. Charles Frohman cast her first in Catherine and then as Stella de Grex in His Excellency the Governor. After that, Frohman finally gave Ethel the role that would make her a star: Madame Trentoni in Captain Jinks of the Horse Marines, which opened at the Garrick Theatre on February 4, 1901. When the tour concluded in Boston in June, she had out-drawn two of the most prominent actresses of her day, Mrs. Patrick Campbell and Minnie Maddern Fiske.
Following her triumph in Captain Jinks, Ethel gave sterling performances in many top-rate productions, and it was in Sunday that she uttered what would be her most famous line, "That's all there is, there isn't any more."[3]
Ethel portrayed Nora in A Doll's House by Ibsen (1905), and Juliet in Romeo and Juliet by Shakespeare (1922). She was also a strong supporter of the Actors' Equity Association and had a high-profile role in the 1919 strike. In 1926, she scored one of her greatest successes as the sophisticated spouse of a philandering husband in W. Somerset Maugham's comedy, The Constant Wife. She starred in Rasputin and the Empress (1932), with John and Lionel Barrymore, playing the Czarina married to Czar Nicholas. In July 1934, she starred in the play Laura Garnett, by Leslie and Sewell Stokes, at Dobbs Ferry, New York State.
After she became a stage star, she would often dismiss adoring audiences who kept demanding curtain calls by saying "That's all there is - there isn't any more!" This became a popular catch phrase in the 1920s and 1930s. Many references to it can be found in the media of the period, including the Laurel and Hardy 1933 film Sons of the Desert, and Arthur Train's 1930 Wall Street Crash novel Paper Profits.
Barrymore was a baseball and boxing fan. Her admiration for boxing ended when she witnessed as a spectator the brutality of the July 4, 1919, Dempsey/Willard fight in which Dempsey broke Willard's jaw and knocked out several of his teeth. Ethel vowed never to attend another boxing match though she would later watch boxing on television.
She appeared in her first motion picture, The Nightingale, in 1914. Members of her family were already in pictures; uncle Sidney and Lionel had entered films in 1911 and John made his first feature in 1913. She made 15 silent pictures between 1914 and 1919 most of them for the old Metro studio. Most of these pictures were made on the East Coast, as her Broadway career and children came first. All of her silent films are lost with the exception of The Awakening of Helena Ritchie (1916) which survives incomplete at the Library of Congress and The Call of Her People(1917) held at George Eastman House, Rochester.[4][5] In the 1940s, she moved to Hollywood, California. The only two films that featured all three siblings—Ethel, John and Lionel—were National Red Cross Pageant (1917) and Rasputin and the Empress (1932). The former film is now lost.
She won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for her role in the 1944 film None but the Lonely Heart opposite Cary Grant, but made plain that she was not overly impressed by it. On March 22, 2007, her Oscar was offered for sale on eBay.
She appeared in The Spiral Staircase (1946) directed by Robert Siodmak, The Paradine Case (1947) directed by Alfred Hitchcock, and Portrait of Jennie (1948), among others. Her last film appearance was in Johnny Trouble (1957). She also made a number of television appearances in the 1950s, including one memorable encounter with comedian Jimmy Durante on NBC's All Star Revue on December 1, 1951 (preserved on a kinescope).
In 1949, Barrymore appeared in the Academy Award winning film Pinky for which she was awarded an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress.
Winston Churchill was among the closest of many of Barrymore's dear friends. Some have claimed Churchill proposed to her in 1900; however, Barrymore mentions no such thing in her autobiography, Memories. She had, at the age of 19, while on tour in England, been rumored to be engaged to the Duke of Manchester, actor Gerald Du Maurier, writer Richard Harding Davis and the aforementioned Churchill.[6]
Ethel Barrymore married Russell Griswold Colt (1882–1959), grandnephew of American arms maker Samuel Colt (1814–1862), on March 14, 1909. The couple had been introduced, according to Barrymore's autobiography, when Colt had strolled by the table where she was having lunch with her uncle, actor John (Jack) Drew, in Sherry's Restaurant in New York.[7] A New York Times article of 1911, when Barrymore first took preliminary divorce measures against Colt, states that Colt had been introduced to Barrymore by her brother John Barrymore some years before while Colt was still a student at Yale.[8] The couple had three children: actress/singer Ethel Barrymore Colt (1912–1977), who appeared on Broadway in Stephen Sondheim's Follies; Samuel Colt (1909–1986); and John Drew Colt (1913–1975).
Barrymore's marriage to Colt was a precarious one from the start, with Barrymore filing divorce papers as early in the marriage as 1911, much to Colt's surprise, and later recanted by Barrymore as a misunderstanding by the press. At least one source claims that Colt abused her and also that he fathered a child with another woman while married to Barrymore. They divorced in 1923 and, quite surprisingly, she did not seek alimony from Colt for herself, which was her right but she demanded that his entailed wealth still provide for their children.
Ethel Barrymore did not remarry. She had platonic relationships with other men, most notably actors Henry Daniell and Louis Calhern.
Ethel Barrymore died of cardiovascular disease in 1959, at her home in Hollywood, California, after having lived for many years with a heart condition. She was two months shy of her 80th birthday. She was entombed at Calvary Cemetery. The Ethel Barrymore Theatre in New York City is named after her.[9]
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