Ethel Barrymore
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Ethel Barrymore, 1896 |
Ethel Barrymore (
August 15,
1879 â€"
June 18,
1959) was an
Academy Award-winning
American actress and a member of the famous
Barrymore family.
Ethel Barrymore was born
Ethel Mae Blythe in
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the second child of the actors
Maurice Barrymore and
Georgiana Drew. She spent her childhood in
Philadelphia,
Pennsylvania, and attended Catholic schools while there.
She was the sister of actors
John Barrymore and
Lionel Barrymore, the aunt of actor
John Drew Barrymore, and the grand-aunt of actress/producer
Drew Barrymore.
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Barrymore playing the male character Carrots in a play of the same name, 1902 |
Ethel Barrymore was highly regarded as a charming and charismatic
stage actress in
New York City and a major
Broadway performer. Her first appearance in Broadway was in 1901, in a play called
Captain Jinks of the Horses Marines. She was a great Nora in
A Doll's House by
Ibsen (1905), and a passionate
Juliet in
Romeo and Juliet by
Shakespeare (1922).
She was also a strong supporter of the
Actors' Equity Association and had a high-profile role in the 1919 strike. 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.
She made her first motion picture in
1914 and in the
1940s, she moved to
Hollywood, California and started working in
motion pictures.
She won the
Oscar for
Best Supporting Actress for her role in the
1944 film
None but the Lonely Heart opposite
Cary Grant, but made plain that she was not overly impressed by it. She made such other classic films as
The Spiral Staircase (1946), a wonderful thriller directed by
Robert Siodmak,
Pinky (1949), and
Kind Lady (1951).
Winston Churchill proposed to her but she turned him down. Ethel married Russell Griswold Colt on
March 14,
1909; they divorced in 1923.
Being a devout
Roman Catholic, she was prohibited from remarrying by the Church. She was involved romantically with men from time to time, but never remarried.
She had 3 children by Colt, including Ethel Barrymore Miglietta, who appeared on
Broadway in
Stephen Sondheim's "Follies". Both of Ethel's sons, Samuel and John Drew Colt, also tried their hand at acting.
Ethel died from
heart disease in 1959 at her home in
Hollywood, California two months shy of her 80th birthday. She is interred in the
Calvary Cemetery, East Los Angeles.
The
Ethel Barrymore Theatre ([
1]) in
New York City is named after her.
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Classic Movies (1939 - 1969): Ethel Barrymore*
Ethel Barrymore Timeline of her life.
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Find-A-Grave profile for Ethel Barrymore
