Ethel Barrymore

Ethel Barrymore, born Ethel Mae Blyth on August 15, 1879, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, was an American actress whose career on stage, screen, and radio spanned six decades. She died on June 18, 1959. A member of the prominent Barrymore acting family, she was the daughter of actors Maurice Barrymore, whose given name was Herbert Blythe, and Georgiana Drew. Her siblings John and Lionel Barrymore were also actors, as were her uncle John Drew Jr., a Broadway matinée idol, and her uncle Sidney Drew, a Vitagraph Studios performer. Her grandmother was actress and theater manager Louisa Lane Drew. She was named after a character in William Makepeace Thackeray's The Newcomes, her father's favorite. John Drew Barrymore was her nephew, and Drew Barrymore her great-niece.

Barrymore spent her childhood in Philadelphia, attending Roman Catholic schools. In 1884 the family relocated to England for two years, during which her father performed at London's Haymarket Theatre. The family returned to the United States in 1886. Her mother, Georgiana, suffered from tuberculosis and traveled to Santa Barbara, California, in the summer of 1893 in search of recovery, dying there in July of that year at age 36. Following their mother's death, Ethel and Lionel were compelled to enter the workforce as teenagers, neither completing high school.

Barrymore's Broadway career began in 1895 and continued through 1944. Her first appearance was in The Imprudent Young Couple, which starred her uncle John Drew Jr. alongside Maude Adams. She appeared with Drew and Adams again the following year in Rosemary. In 1897 she traveled to London with William Gillette's company to play Miss Kittridge in Secret Service. While there, Henry Irving and Ellen Terry offered her the role of Annette in The Bells, and she subsequently created the role of Euphrosine in Peter the Great at the Lyceum on New Year's Day 1898, a play written by Irving's son Laurence. During her London period, Winston Churchill proposed marriage to her; she declined, not wishing to be a politician's wife, though the two remained friends for the rest of her life.

Returning to the United States, Barrymore was cast by producer Charles Frohman, first in Catherine and then as Stella de Grex in His Excellency the Governor. Frohman then gave her the role of Madame Trentoni in Captain Jinks of the Horse Marines, which opened at the Garrick Theatre on February 4, 1901. Her father Maurice attended a performance without her knowledge, and afterward congratulated her in person — the only occasion on which he saw her perform professionally. When the production's tour concluded in Boston, she had drawn larger audiences than Mrs. Patrick Campbell and Minnie Maddern Fiske. It was in Thomas Raceward's Sunday that she first delivered the line that would become her signature: "That's all there is, there isn't any more." She later used the phrase to dismiss audiences demanding repeated curtain calls, and it became a widely recognized catchphrase through the 1920s and 1930s, referenced in the 1933 Laurel and Hardy film Sons of the Desert and Arthur Train's 1930 novel Paper Profits.

Among her subsequent Broadway credits were roles in Cousin Kate, Alice Sit-by-the-Fire, and Her Sister. She portrayed Nora in Ibsen's A Doll's House in 1905 and Juliet in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet in 1922. In 1926 she appeared in W. Somerset Maugham's comedy The Constant Wife, playing the sophisticated wife of a philandering husband. Later Broadway appearances included the drama The Corn Is Green and Embezzled Heaven. In July 1934 she starred in Laura Garnett, by Leslie and Sewell Stokes, at Dobbs Ferry, New York.

Barrymore was a committed supporter of the Actors' Equity Association and played a prominent role in the 1919 strike. During the strike, she and Lionel Barrymore performed in a benefit show staged by the AEA at the Lexington Avenue Opera House alongside friend Marie Dressler. Her involvement cost her the friendship of actor, songwriter, and producer George M. Cohan, who opposed the strike. In 1928 the Shuberts opened the Ethel Barrymore Theatre, which continues to operate under that name. In 1938 she became the first artistic director of the Olney Theatre Center in Olney, Maryland.

Barrymore's film career began with her first feature, The Nightingale, in 1914. Between 1914 and 1919 she made fifteen silent pictures, most of them for Metro Pictures and produced on the East Coast. Surviving silent films include one reel of The Awakening of Helena Richie (1916), held at the Library of Congress, and The Call of Her People (1917), preserved at the George Eastman House. She and her brothers Lionel and John appeared together on screen in the National Red Cross Pageant (1917), now considered a lost film, and in Rasputin and the Empress (1932), in which she played the czarina. She won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her performance opposite Cary Grant in None but the Lonely Heart (1944) and received additional nominations in the same category for The Spiral Staircase (1946), directed by Robert Siodmak, The Paradine Case (1947), directed by Alfred Hitchcock, and Pinky (1949). Other film appearances included Portrait of Jennie (1948) and The Red Danube (1949). Her final film role was in Johnny Trouble (1957).