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] Barrymore was a stage, screen and radio actress whose career spanned six decades, and was regarded as "The First Lady of the American Theatre". She received four nominations for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, winning for None but the Lonely Heart (1944).
She spent her childhood in Philadelphia and attended Roman Catholic schools there.
In 1884, the family 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 and later being reprimanded by her parents for showing fear of Wilde. 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 years in England were the happiest of her childhood years due to the fact the Barrymores were more of a nuclear family in London than in the United States.
Career
Barrymore in 1901 in one of the costumes from Captain Jinks of the Horse Marines
In the summer of 1893, Barrymore was in the company of her mother Georgie, who had been ailing from tuberculosis and took a curative sabbatical to Santa Barbara, California, not far from where family friendHelena Modjeska had a retreat. Georgie did not recover and died in July 1893 a week before her 37th birthday. Essentially Ethel's and Lionel's childhood ended when Georgie died; they were forced to go to work in their teens with neither finishing high school. John, a few years younger, stayed with their grandmother and other relatives. Barrymore's first appearance on 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.[6]
In 1897 Ethel went with William Gillette to London to play Miss Kittridge in Gillette's Secret Service. 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 Year's 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 Winston Churchill, who asked her to marry him. Not wishing to be a politician's wife, she refused. Winston, years later, married Clementine Hozier, who looked very much like Ethel. Winston and Ethel remained friends until the end of her life.
Barrymore playing the male character Carrots in a play of the same name, 1902
After her season in London, Ethel returned to the U.S. Charles Frohman cast her first in Catherine and then as Stella de Grex in His Excellency the Governor.[7] After that, Frohman finally gave Ethel the role that would make her a star: Madame Trentoni in Captain Jinks of the Horse Marines,[8] which opened at the Garrick Theatre in London's West End on February 4, 1901. Unbeknownst to Ethel, her father Maurice had witnessed the performance as an audience member and walked up to his daughter, congratulated her and gave her a big hug. It was the first and only time he saw her on stage professionally. 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 Thomas Raceward's Sunday that she uttered what would be her most famous line, "That's all there is, there isn't any more."[9]
Barrymore, along with friend Marie Dressler, was a strong supporter of the Actors' Equity Association and had a high-profile role in the 1919 strike. During the strike, Ethel and Lionel Barrymore starred in a benefit show staged by AEA at the Lexington Avenue Opera House.[10] AEA came into being primarily to allow performers to have a bigger share in the profits of stage productions and to provide benefit to elderly or infirm actors. Barrymore's involvement in AEA may have been motivated by the fate of both of her parents, both long standing actors, her mother who had needed proper medical care and her father who required years of institutionalized care. Her support for the strike angered many producers and cost Barrymore her friendship with George M. Cohan, an actor, songwriter and producer.[11]
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 (Maugham counted himself among her admirers, saying that during rehearsals for the play he had "fallen madly in love with her.")[12] She starred in Rasputin and the Empress (1932), 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.
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. It is sometimes recalled on modern day radio stations annually every August 15 when Ethel's birthday is mentioned.
Barrymore was a baseball and boxing fan. Her admiration for boxing ended when she witnessed 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.
Barrymore appeared in her first feature 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 the George Eastman House.[15][16]
Barrymore starred in Miss Hattie, described as "a short-lived situation comedy," on ABC in 1944–1945.[17] In one episode, Barrymore's character was "asked by Rob Thompson to direct a play which the workers of his war plant are presenting in order to raise money for war bonds."[18] Barrymore starred, along with Gene Kelly, in the June 1, 1949, episode of Suspense, entitled "To Find Help".
Television
Barrymore 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, which is preserved on a kinescope. In 1956, she hosted 14 episodes of the TV series Ethel Barrymore Theatre, produced by the DuMont Television Network and presented on the DuMont flagship station WABD just as the network was folding. Unfortunately none of the episodes were preserved on kinescope. A 1952 appearance on What's My Line? survives, however, in addition to several radio broadcasts.
Popular culture
In the romantic time travel film Somewhere in Time (1980), a photo of Barrymore wearing nun's habit from her 1928 play The Kingdom of God can be seen. Christopher Reeve plays a journalist rummaging through old theater albums at a large Michigan hotel. He uncovers the photos of Barrymore in the play and childhood photos of actresses Blanche Ring and Rose Stahl.
In the musical film Singin' in the Rain (1952), Barrymore is held up as an example of a lofty actress when Gene Kelly mocks Debbie Reynolds in a squabble about what makes a serious actor. He repeats the humorous taunt when Reynolds jumps out of a giant cake as a show girl.
Personal life
Barrymore with her husband Russell Griswold Colt and their three children, c. 1914.Portrait by Carl Van Vechten, 1937
Winston Churchill was among Barrymore's many new friends in England. Churchill reportedly proposed to her in 1900;[19] Barrymore mentions no such thing in her autobiography, though she includes a photograph of herself and Churchill on the lawn at Blenheim Palace in 1899. While touring in England at age 19, she had been rumored to be engaged to the Duke of Manchester, actor Gerald du Maurier, writer Richard Harding Davis and Churchill.[20] 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!"[4]
Ethel Barrymore married Russell Griswold Colt (1882–1960) 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 (Uncle Jack) Drew, in Sherry's Restaurant in New York.[21] 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.[22][23] As Colt was an extremely wealthy young man and tied to even more money through his family, a divorce from him was high profile and the troubled marriage stayed in the newspapers for some time.[24][25][26]
The couple had three children: Samuel "Sammy" Colt (1909–1986), a Hollywood agent and occasional actor; 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 alleged Colt abused her and that he fathered a child with another woman while married to Barrymore. They divorced in 1923 but on a cordial basis and according to her memoirs would sometimes have supper together. Barrymore did not seek alimony from Colt for herself, but she demanded that his entailed wealth provide for their children.[citation needed] A devout Catholic,[citation needed] Ethel Barrymore never remarried.
Barrymore campaigned for the reelection of President Herbert Hoover in 1932.[27]
^ “Ethel Barrymore Director of New Summer Theater". The Washington Post. March 21, 1938. p. X9.
^“Distinguished Stars Manifest Interest In Capital's Proposed Summer Theater". The Washington Post. April 12, 1938. p. X16.
^Catalog of Holdings, The American Film Institute Collection and the United Artists Collection at The Library of Congress, page 10 published by The American Film Institute c. 1978; for The Awakening of Helena Ritchie (1916)
^Sies, Luther F. (2014). Encyclopedia of American Radio, 1920-1960, 2nd Edition, Volume 1. McFarland & Company, Inc. ISBN978-0-7864-5149-4. P. 56.
^"WHMA". The Anniston Sun. February 11, 1945. p. 6. Retrieved April 16, 2015 – via Newspapers.com.
^Wenden, D.J. (1993). "Churchill, Radio, and Cinema". In Blake, Robert B.; Louis, William Roger (eds.). Churchill. Oxford: Clarendon Press. p. 236. ISBN0-19-820626-7.
^Great Stars of the American Stage by Daniel Blum c.1952 Profile #56
^Memories: An Autobiography by Ethel Barrymore. (Harper and Brothers, 1955, page 162.)
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