John Barrymore

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Barrymore, John [ Sidney Blythe] (1882–1942), actor. The younger son of Maurice Barrymore and Georgiana Drew Barrymore, he was born in Philadelphia and made his stage debut in Chicago in 1903 as Max in Magda, then made his New York debut in the same year as Corley in Glad of It. Supporting roles followed in The Dictator (1904), Yvette (1904), Sunday (1905), Alice Sit‐by‐the‐Fire (1905), and Miss Civilization (1906). For several seasons he played supporting roles before replacing the leading man in The Boys of Company B (1907), following that with the major role of Lord Meadows in Toddles (1908). Later the same year Barrymore turned leading man in musical comedy, playing Mac, the sculptor, in A Stubborn Cinderella. For two years he portrayed Nat Duncan, the city slicker determined to win a rich hick, in The Fortune Hunter (1909). A number of failures or modest successes followed, but with his performance as William Falder, the cruelly imprisoned clerk in Justice (1916), Barrymore abandoned more superficially theatrical roles and revealed surprising depth. His reputation grew with his Peter Ibbetson (1917), a man who attempts to transcend time, and with his Fedor Vasilyevich Protosov in Tolstoy's Redemption (1918). A major success, The Jest (1919), found him playing the put‐upon hero Ginnetto to his brother Lionel's villainous Neri. In the 1920s he played only three roles, two of which are generally acknowledged as the pinnacles of his career: in 1920 Richard III and in 1923 Hamlet, which established a New York long run for the play at the time. After many years in Hollywood he returned to Broadway briefly in a feeble comedy, My Dear Children (1939). Looking back, John Mason Brown reminisced, “Although I have sat before many Hamlets, some better read and more solidly conceived, John Barrymore, with his slim, proud figure, the lean Russian wolfhound aquilinity of his profile, and the princely beauty of his full face, continues for me to be the embodiment of the Dane . . . though undisciplined, it crackled with the lightning of personality.” There seems little disagreement that had he possessed the dedication and determination, he would have been the greatest actor of his generation. After 1925, however, the hedonistic actor dissipated his talents. His antics were satirized in the personage of the gadabout matinee idol Anthony Cavendish in The Royal Family (1927), and decades later the actor was the focal character in a handful of plays, including Ned and Jack (1981), I Hate Hamlet (1991), Jack (1996), and Barrymore (1997). Biography: Damned in Paradise: The Life of John Barrymore, J. Kobler, 1977.