Actress Ethel Barrymore, sister to Lionel and John, great-aunt to Drew, was born on this day in 1879 (she died in 1959, her life having spanned the horse-and-buggy to Cadillac-with-tailfins.) Dubbed "The First Lady of the American Theatre", she had been a star for just about the entirety of the 20th century up to that point when, in 1936 at age 56, she decided to call it quits:
If you're curious about that civil war, Ernest Hemingway turned it into a novel. Getting back to Ethel Barrymore, that retirement was a short-lived one, so short that it's not even mentioned on her Wikipedia page, her IMDb page, her Turner Classic Movies page, her Find a Grave page, or any of a half a dozen websites devoted to celebrity horoscopes. Finally, I found mention of it in her New York Times obituary. The retirement lasted a year. More like an extended leave of absence. Before giving notice, Ethel had appeared in at least 55 stage productions. After she came out of retirement, she starred in six more plays, including what turned out to be her greatest success, The Corn is Green, which ran on Broadway in three different theaters between 1940 and 1942 for a total of 477 performances. A year later, she returned to the role of Welsh schoolteacher Miss Moffat for an additional 56 performances. After that crowning achievement, there was one more Broadway production, Embezzled Heaven (sounds like The Donald Trump Story) which ran for 52 performances. By the time it ended, Ethel was almost 65. Though she was now the right age for retirement, she chose to keep on working. Unlike when she first went on stage at about age 15 in the final decade of the 19th century, there was now more options available to an actress, as long as one was reconciled to the fact that cameras don't give applause, which the reportedly no-nonsense Ethel didn't seem to mind.
Odd thing about those Barrymore siblings. We're told they dominated the Broadway stage for the first few decades of the 20th century, but that doesn't do those of us ensconced in the first few decades of the 21st much good. It's not like we can readily hop on a horse-drawn streetcar to the Garrick Theater and watch Captain Jinks of the Horse Marines. As with Sarah Siddons and Edwin Booth, we have to take it on the word of contemporary critics that Lionel's, Ethel's, and John's stage performances were all that they were cracked up to be. However, unlike Siddons, who died in 1831, or Booth, who departed this life, somewhat embarrassed by his brother's antics, in 1893, the Barrymores lived well into the 20th century, which means of course that we have their later films to give us some idea of their past glories. Actually, the stage glories and the movie glories sometimes ran parallel to each other, especially in the case of John. The youngest of the three, he became a bona fide movie star just a few years after becoming a bona fide Broadway star (by playing Hamlet.) Though his stardom came last, he was really the only one to achieve equal and simultaneous success on both stage and screen (to celebrate, he broke open the champagne, and anything else he could find in the liquor cabinet.) Lionel's film stardom is a bit more qualified. He was never quite the leading man in movies, at least not in talkies, as he had been earlier on stage. Quite handsome when he was young, he got increasingly craggier with age. If a voice can be called craggy, Lionel had that, too. Certainly it was one of the most recognizable in talkies, and that arguably made him the preeminent character actor of his day. If brother John played a dashing jewel thief in Grand Hotel and a dashing former silent screen star in Dinner at Eight, then Lionel was nonetheless was put to good use as a dying accountant in the former and a dying industrialist in the latter. Ironically, his characters are still alive at the end of each movie while John's characters are not! Lionel does die in A Free Soul (which also happened to be Clark Gable's breakthrough film), netting him an Oscar, a prize that eluded John. At awards time, it's sometimes better to have a craggy face than a great profile. So in demand was Lionel for character parts, usually supporting roles, that eventually wheelchairs were written into screenplays to accommodate his increasingly crippling arthritis.
That leaves Ethel. Of the three she had the biggest Broadway career over a longer stretch of time. By her late 40s she was already considered enough of a legend to have a theater on the Great White Way named after her (it's still there today.) Yet when it comes to film she kind of lagged behind John and Lionel, partly because she didn't care all that much about being a movie star, always holding Hollywood a bit in disdain. Not that she boycotted motion pictures altogether. Her first film, now believed lost, was 1914's The Nightingale. Thirteen more full-length movies followed, all made in the 1910s. With the exception of a single short, Camille, Ethel didn't appear on screen at all in the 1920s. Finally, in 1932, she starred with her two brothers in Rasputin and the Empress (which I wrote about way back when.) This was the second and last movie the three siblings appeared in together (the first, 1917's National Red Cross Pageant, a World War I morale booster, is believed lost.) After that, Ethel stayed away from moving picture cameras for another twelve years. After which it seemed like she couldn't get enough of them. I don't know what changed exactly. Maybe the Broadway workload was a bit much for a woman closing in on 70. Ethel moved to Hollywood, a place she once compared to a "Sixth Avenue peepshow", worked in Hollywood, and eventually died in Hollywood. The first film she made after moving to the West Coast was 1944's None But the Lonely Heart, starring Cary Grant, which won her an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress. She also received Academy Award nominations for The Spiral Staircase, The Paradine Case, and Pinky. She wasn't nominated for anything, but I strongly suggest you see her in Portrait of Jennie. She's excellent as a self-described "old maid" who seems to have an unconsumated crush on a much younger Joseph Cotten (who himself has a crush on a ghost he meets in Central Park.) These movies and one or two others are Ethel's film career highlights. She also appeared in many lesser films, as money was thrown at her by producers hoping her presence in a movie would give the thing a touch of class. It was always money well-thrown. In the last fifteen years of her life, Ethel made 21 pictures.
Here's Ethel and Bogie:
Now you know why she came out of retirement.
