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) on the set of the silent film Sherlock Holmes (1922)
Birth name	John Sidney Blyth
Born	February 14, 1882 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Died	May 29, 1942 Los Angeles, California
Other name(s)	The Great Profile Jack
Spouse(s)	Katherine Corri Harris (1910-1916) Blanche Oelrichs (1920-1928) Dolores Costello (1928-1935) Elaine Barrie (1936-1940)
Notable roles	Jekyll and Hyde in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1920) Don Juan in Don Juan (1926) Evans Garrick in The Great Profile (1940)

John Sidney Blyth Barrymore (February 14, 1882 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania – May 29, 1942 in Los Angeles, California), was an American actor.

He gained fame as a stage actor, lauded for his portrayals of Hamlet and Richard III, and is frequently called the greatest actor of his generation. He was the brother of Lionel Barrymore and Ethel Barrymore, and the grandfather of Drew Barrymore.

1 Background
2 Marriages
3 Dying words
4 Trivia
5 Quotations
6 Notes
7 See also
8 References
9 External links
10 See also

[edit] Background

Barrymore was born into an illustrious theatrical family. His parents were Maurice Barrymore and Georgiana Drew. His classic nose and distinguished features won him the nickname "The Great Profile." He was expelled from Georgetown Preparatory School in 1898 after being caught attending a bordello. He was a hard-drinking adventurer with a jaunty personality.

A notorious ladies' man, 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.

In 1906, he stayed at the St. Francis Hotel, San Francisco, when the big earthquake struck. He had starred a production of The Dictator and was booked to sail to Australia to tour with it. Since he loathed this prospect, he decided to disappear, spending the next few days drinking at the home of a friend on Van Ness avenue. During his drinking jag, he had worked out a plan to exploit the earthquake for his own ends. He decided to present himself as an on-the-scene "reporter" of what had really happened in San Francisco. The one discrepancy between John Barrymore's "report" and those written by others involved in the disaster was that the actor made up virtually all he claimed to have seen. 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.^[2]

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) 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. He didn't return to the stage again until 1942, when he embarrassed himself in the third-rate farce My Dear Children.

His movie roles included A.J. Raffles in Raffles the Amateur Cracksman (1917), Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1920), Sherlock Holmes (1922), Beau Brummel (1924), Captain Ahab in both The Sea Beast (1926) and Moby Dick (1930), Don Juan (1926), Svengali (1931), and the leading man in Grand Hotel (1932), Dinner at Eight (1933) and Twentieth Century (1934). He worked opposite many of the foremost leading ladies, including Greta Garbo, Katharine Hepburn, Joan Crawford, and Carole Lombard. In the late 1930s alcoholism and possibly Alzheimer's Disease encroached on his ability to remember his lines, and his diminished abilities were plainly apparent in an existing screen test that he made for an aborted film of Hamlet in 1934. His last movie characters were broad and distasteful caricatures of himself, in movies such as Playmates (1941) with Kay Kyser.

[edit] Marriages

Katherine Corri Harris (1891-1927), an actress who starred in the 1918 film The House of Mirth, on September 1, 1910 and divorced in 1916.
Blanche Marie Louise Oelrichs (1890-1950), aka "Michael Strange," on August 5, 1920 and divorced her in 1925. They had one child:
- Diana Blanche Barrymore (1921-1960), whose tragic life ended at age 38. A semi-autobiographical story of her life was depicted in Too Much, Too Soon, starring Errol Flynn as her father
Dolores Costello (1903-1979), actress and model best known for Little Lord Fauntleroy (1936); they married on November 24, 1928 and divorced in 1935. They had two children:
- Dolores Ethel Mae Barrymore (living)
- John Drew Barrymore (father of Drew Barrymore)
Elaine Barrie (née Elaine Jacobs), (1916-2003), an actress; married November 9, 1936 and divorced 1940

[edit] Dying words

His dying words were "Die? I should say not, dear fellow. No Barrymore would allow such a conventional thing to happen to him." 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 with Jack Cassidy as Barrymore. Other accounts of this classic Hollywood tale substitute actor Peter Lorre in the place of Walsh.

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".

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

[edit] Trivia

This article contains a trivia section.
Content in this section should be integrated into other appropriate areas of the article or removed, and the trivia section removed.

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 was fond of sailing, and owned his own yacht, "The Mariner", on which he could escape unhappy wives, mistresses, lawyers, and creditors.
He owned a pet monkey named Clementine, which he adored, and which appeared with her master in the films The Sea Beast(1926), Don Juan(1926) & When A Man Loves(1927). Clementine was a gift from English actress Gladys Cooper.
He named his favourite accommodation in a boarding house "The Alchemist's Corner".
He was portrayed by Jack Cassidy in the 1976 film W.C. Fields and Me and by Christopher Plummer in the 1996 one-man show Barrymore.
The Barrymore Estate is believed to be haunted by his spirit, referenced in Paul Rudnick play I Hate Hamlet.

[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.^[3]

[edit] Notes

^ Gordon Thomas & 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)
^ Gordon Thomas & 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)
^ Fowler, Gene: Good Night, Sweet Prince (Viking Press, 1944; page 463)