HOLLYWOOD `S "First Lady of the American Theater",
ETHEL BARRYMORE BORN ON 1879 AUGUST 15
Ethel Barrymore (born Ethel Mae Blythe; August 15, 1879 – June 18, 1959) was an American actress and a member of the Barrymore family of actors.[1][2] Regarded as the
"First Lady of the American Theater",
Barrymore was a preeminent stage actress in her era and her career spanned six decades
Early life[edit]
Ethel Barrymore was born Ethel Mae Blythe in Philadelphia, the second child of the actors Maurice Barrymore (whose real name was Herbert Blythe) and Georgiana Drew.[3] She was named for her father’s favorite character—Ethel in William Makepeace Thackeray’s The Newcomes.
She was the sister of actors John Barrymore and Lionel Barrymore, the aunt of actor John Drew Barrymore, and the grand-aunt of actress Drew Barrymore. She was also a granddaughter of actress and theater-manager Louisa Lane Drew, and niece of Broadway matinée idol John Drew Jr and early Vitagraph Studios movie star Sidney Drew.
She spent her childhood in Philadelphia, and attended Roman Catholic schools there.
Barrymore in 1901 in one of the costumes from Captain Jinks of the Horse Marines In 1884 she, her parents and brothers sailed to England and stayed two years.
Maurice had inherited a substantial amount of money from an aunt and decided to exhibit a play and star in some plays at London's Haymarket Theatre.[4]
Ethel recalled being frightened on first meeting Oscar Wilde when handing him some cakes.
Returning to the U.S. in 1886 her father took her to her first baseball game. She established a lifelong love of baseball and wanted to be a concert pianist.[5]
The two years in England were the happiest of her childhood years no doubt due to the fact that the Barrymores were more of a nuclear family in London than at any other time when in the United States.
Film[edit]
Barrymore appeared in her first motion picture,
The Nightingale, in 1914.
Members of her family were already in pictures;
uncle Sidney Drew, his wife Gladys Rankin and Lionel had entered films in 1911 and
John made his first feature in 1913 after having debuted in Lubin short films in 1912.
She made 15 silent pictures between 1914 and 1919, most of them for the Metro Pictures studio.
Most of these pictures were made on the East Coast, as her Broadway career and children came first. A few of her silent films have survived for example one reel from The Awakening of Helena Richie (1916) which survives at the Library of Congress and The Call of Her People (1917) held at George Eastman House.[10][11]
In the 1940s, she moved to Hollywood. As children she and her brothers put on amateur or home made plays together often with Lionel the hero and John the villain, Ethel of course being the heroine.
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 considered a lost film.
Barrymore won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her role in the film None but the Lonely Heart (1944) 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
Winston Churchill was among many of Barrymore's new friends in England. Churchill reportedly proposed to her in 1900;[14]
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.[15]
Upon her engagement to Laurence Irving, son of Sir Henry Irving, an old friend of Mrs. John Drew, she cabled her father Maurice who responded with a cable "Congratulations!". When she broke up with Irving she cabled Maurice who wired back "Congratulations!".
Ethel Barrymore married Russell Griswold Colt (1882–1960), grandnephew of American arms maker Samuel Colt (1814–1862), on March 14, 1909.
 |
| Ethel Barrymore, husband Russell Griswold Colt and their three children, circa 1914. |
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 (Uncle Jack) Drew, in Sherry's Restaurant in New York.[16] 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.[17]
The couple had three children:
Samuel Colt (1909–1986) a Hollywood agent;
actress/singer Ethel Barrymore Colt (1912–1977), who appeared on Broadway in Stephen Sondheim's Follies; and
John Drew Colt (1913–1975) who became an actor.
Barrymore's marriage to Colt was precarious 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, a servant, alleged that Colt abused her and also that he fathered a child with another woman while married to Barrymore.
They divorced in 1923 and she did not seek alimony from Colt for herself, which was her right but she demanded that his entailed wealth provide for their children.[citation needed]
A devout Catholic[citation needed],
Ethel Barrymore never remarried.
Death[edit]
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 less than two months shy of her 80th birthday. She was entombed at Calvary Cemetery. The Ethel Barrymore Theatre in New York City is named for her.[18]
Ethel Barrymore is a member of the American Theater Hall of Fame, along with her brothers, John and Lionel.[19]
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