Mention “The Barrymores” to a classic film fan of a certain age, and the comparatively young and deft contemporary actress Drew may not be the first name that comes to mind. You’ll find many of this cherished band attached to the ubiquitous and occasionally brilliant Lionel Barrymore’s performances, (thanks to his long tenure at M.G.M., he is still familiar to many, though it is his little known performance as the death-defying grandfather in On Borrowed Time (1939) that flares most vividly in my memory). Others will claim fealty to the glamorous, self-destructive John Barrymore, whose wildly uneven film work, including his truly brilliant comedic work in Twentieth Century (1934) and his lacerating dramatic appearance in Counsellor-At-Law (1933) are still high water marks in cinematic acting for me. Less than 30 performances exist on film for their sister, but some of them are very appealing to me.

Few, however, seem to be overly fond of the cool reserve of talent of their sister displayed by Ethel Barrymore, for whom last Friday, August 15th, marked the one hundredth and twenty ninth anniversary of her birth in 1879. That may be partly due to her reluctance to embrace the movies. There is something less easily defined about her screen persona; a refusal on her part to fill in all the blanks of her cryptic cinematic characters, who say more with a flash of her still beautiful dark eyes or the suggestion of a smile than any screenwriter could ever suggest in a page of dialogue. Frankly, Ethel Barrymore always acted as though she was slumming in most of her movies. In several cases, she was often right about that too.

For evidence, see her first, deadly slow talkie, and the only film in which Ethel tussled with her brothers for the spotlight, Rasputin and the Empress (1932).

Director Boleslawski & Ethel (1932)

Insecure and supremely lofty in her condescending manner when she took this job at MGM at the urging of prestige-mad Irving Thalberg (and Ethel’s impatient creditors), she fussed about the script (or lack thereof), her director (poor Charles Brabin was dismissed at her insistence, to be replaced by Moscow Art Theater veteran and somewhat overwhelmed cinematic tyro, Richard Boleslawski, seen at right with Ethel on the set). I guess it never occurred to any of the intimidated to ask her what she was doing as she flailed around grandly trying to create something memorable out of her vague character in a highly stagey manner. Fortunately, that is what family is for in many instances. Brother John, finally asking her to explain what the heck she was trying to do, received a heartfelt reply of “I don’t know.” Though she only admitted publicly a few times, Ethel was she was “always scared to death” because of her shyness when she went on any stage or before the cameras. Taking her aside, John Barrymore, (who might have taken his own advice occasionally), urged her to tone her characterization down a bit, speak more softly, remember the over $50k she was getting for this gig, and try to forget about Lionel’s over the top scene stealing as a wild-eyed Rasputin threatening the Czarina, her family and the state of Mother Russia. Not that his advice could save this turkey, which, if you’ve ever seen it on TCM, is fascinating, if the slowest moving mass of historical inaccuracies that ever came out of tinseltown. (Sued by more than one survivor of the Czar’s court and the Russian Revolution for fudging the facts and impugning some royal reputations, it lost a pile for the studio as well).

I recently mentioned Ethel Barrymore’s presence in a movie as a compelling enough reason to watch a film. A friend reacted with a visible chill, wrinkling her nose at the thought of going out of her way to see Ethel, the somewhat frostily regal, but to me intriguing presence in almost any of her movies. My reluctant friend explained that Ethel always struck her as too stuffy a presence, and even suggested that there was something malevolent about her presence. My attitude is “Yes!”, I relish that fuddy-duddiness of hers, that refusal to be fashionable, as well as her mysterious and possibly latently hostile roles in a variety of movies over a period of about ten years, from her openly cool mother to ne’er-do-well Cary Grant in None But the Lonely Heart (1944), (which won her an Academy Award as Best Supporting Actress), to last week’s broadcast on TCM of a fifties artifact, Young at Heart (1954), which offered up Ethel as a maiden aunt with a smiling cheshire cat smile, tending to the needs of a whippet-sized Frank Sinatra, Doris Day and company.

Ethel, edging away from the cast of Young at Heart (1954)

In the case of the last film, (a remake of the more dramatically interesting John Garfield debut opposite Priscilla Lane in 1938’s Four Daughters), I kept wondering when Ethel was going to finally turn around and tell the youngsters to put a cork in their belly-aching. The best scene in the movie, for me, features Ethel’s on-screen brother, Robert Keith, (in the story, the father of a brood of ferociously marriage-minded blondes, led by Doris, Dorothy Malone & Elizabeth Fraser), playing the flute annoyingly while Miss Barrymore tries to catch the Friday Night Boxing Match on the tube. Aside from Sinatra’s excellent singing, which took the movie off into another, hipper universe occasionally, the most genuine emotions in the movie passed over Ethel’s mug when she really looked disgusted after paying her brother his winnings, after her white-trunked pugilist took a dive. A lifetime of competition with her sibling and a healthy interest in the rude entertainments of her time were all expressed with the downturn of her mouth and the raising of an eyebrow. The expressiveness that she brought to her film work rarely went over the top after she took her brother Jack’s advice to heart. Unlike Lionel and John, their independent sister Ethel was never wholly a prisoner of Hollywood, or so she hoped. Consequently, she was also never in a wholly popular success in the movies either, such as those cherished now, among them the perennials Grand Hotel (1932) and It’s a Wonderful Life (1946). Her theatrical history and her reluctance to play the game in the company town helped to keep her distance from the ballyhoo, even after California had become her home. With her erstwhile actor son, Samuel Colt by her side, in a small home where she was visited regularly by George Cukor, Katharine Hepburn and others, (who also contributed to her financial support, and found her occasional work), Ethel Barrymore eked out a living, occasionally showing flashes of the brilliance that built her reputation, and even surprising audiences and contemporaries once in awhile with her skill and her down-to-earth mystery.

During her desultory shooting on the film with Day and Sinatra, Barrymore had several physical problems that made it a heckuva lot easier to lie down and act or be wheeled about on the set. Still, when ballerina Alicia Markova visited the set of Young at Heart (1954), Miss Barrymore astonished all by promptly springing from her chair, crossing the soundstage and greeting the prima ballerina and her friend warmly. Co-star Doris Day later remarked to a companion, “Can you believe it? She’s never out of that chair. I mean, we have to cart her around everywhere.”

Ethel liked to take people aback, and could never, seemingly shed her magisterial air completely.

Spotting his leading lady on the set of None But the Lonely Heart for the first time, director Clifford Odets, asked to approve the actress’ choice of the most pathetic hat for her working class character’s headgear, burst into laughter, remarking that “You still look like a queen!” As the astute theater man Harold Clurman observed when trying to explain her naturally regal demeanor that “[i]t is a spiritual rather than a social quality,” he observed. “Very few kings and queens have possessed it.”
Despite that stately appearance she was asked to project on screen, I sometimes suspect that Ethel Barrymore had a streak of mischievousness that crept out into her acting in movies in her later years, particularly in her byplay with Charles Bickford in The Farmer’s Daughter and with Hoagy Carmichael in the neglected Night Song) As with her brothers, she struggled with her personal life, (enduring an unhappy marriage to Russell Colt while giving birth to three children), substance abuse, (alcohol was no more her friend than it was for other family members, though she too sought refuge in it when life wore her down), and seemingly, an inherited tendency toward monetary impecuniousness that left her strapped all her life, despite a demon work ethic in her bones. Her daughter, who described her mother as “a caged tigress” when she wasn’t working, may have been relieved when her aging mother finally moved to Hollywood in the forties, after dipping her toe only occasionally into movie-making since the silent era.

How are you at reading faces? While we all do it, consciously or not, all day long, if I were a betting woman, I’d put a fiver on Ethel Barrymore’s carefully arranged expression in the photo below as a sign of mild irritation bordering on bored peevishness.

The occasion was the celebration of her 70th birthday on August 15, 1949. Mogul Louis B. Mayer, looking like a bit of a lost lamb between Ethel and Lionel, insisted that a national radio hookup be arranged with greetings and salutations pouring in from all points of the compass for the delectation of the public, or, as Ethel was wont to phrase it, to give everyone their money’s worth “gawking at the fossils.” On a later birthday (her 75th), Ethel was asked what she thought of the attention, which by then included the new medium of television. Her reply: “It’s hell.” Yet, since she was a theatrical “institution” and a rather expensive contract player for M.G.M. at the time of these birtdays, (a situation that would change abruptly some time later with the completion of her role as the prisoner in her own home in Kind Lady. After too many days were lost in production due to her multiple illnesses and a vexing tendency to whistle when she spoke her lines, her option was summarily dropped, and she would be employed only sporadically from then on). Ethel, whose attitude toward acting and Hollywood was, at best, described as realistic, really would might have preferred a day off. After all, she’d been working since the age of thirteen.

Born into the tenth generation of a gifted acting family led by parents Maurice and Georgiana Drew Barrymore a year after her stalwart brother, Lionel, and three years prior to the dazzling John; in her lifetime, Ethel may have received the greatest respect from the theater-going public, in part because they never knew as much as they thought they did about her. As the only girl, and at least superficially, the most capable sibling in the trio of children adrift on the tides of the world’s shoals and eddys, Ethel endured, learning from childhood, that it was up to her to get things done in the often far-flung, peripatetic family of actors. At thirteen, Ethel, secretly hoping to study piano as a serious musician, had been removed from school and told to accompany the actress-mother she barely knew on a rest cure to Santa Barbara. Coughing all the way to the coast during their ocean voyage from New York through the Panama Canal to California, it was Ethel whose spirits rose and fell with every rally and setback Georgiana Drew Barrymore experienced during the trip to the West Coast. It was Ethel alone who accompanied her mother’s coffin back to the east coast after Georgie’s death at 37 from tuberculosis in July, 1893. Any further serious musical education was deferred in favor of setting out in the family business of acting.

“Speak your piece good and you will get a big red apple,” was a maxim that her uncle, John Drew quoted to her when giving her the encouragement she craved as she first ventured on stage in a star part, in Clyde Fitch’s “Captain Jinks of the Horse Marines” in 1901. He left her a large red apple. It was the initiation of a custom which became a Barrymore tradition. Later, after their spendthrift father Maurice became incapacitated, Ethel guided her brothers Lionel and Jack, both of whom longed to become artists, into show business as well. Her appearance as a young woman was so enchanting that a very young Winston Churchill sought her out, became friends and even asked for her hand in marriage. By the end of the ’40s, when fellow actor Louis Calhern mentioned having met then ex-Prime Minister Churchill during a recent appearance on the London stage, he related to Ethel that her former beau had grown misty-eyed speaking of her. Perhaps in an effort to keep sentiment at arm’s length, or simply to shock Calhern, Ethel glibly asked, “How is the old sonofabitch?” Anything to keep her real emotions from showing, since she’d spent a lifetime tailoring them to dramatic effect on stage. Years of work also took their toll on her physically, making those roles in which she literally lay at death’s door on screen a pretty regular event. In The Spiral Staircase (1945), Pinky (1947), The Great Sinner (1949) and Kind Lady (1951), all entailed a minimum of movement, though, she was central to whatever success these movies may have had. Here are a few examples of moments when Ethel’s sometimes playful, talented nature shone through while she stole the scene:

While making Hitchcock’s The Paradine Case (1947) with Gregory Peck, the young actor, who was frankly in awe of Ethel’s ability to create a very human character from the meagerly written role given her as Charles Laughton’s emotionally starved wife, found that she reveled in discussing her beloved New York Yankees and the antics of the prizefighting game, especially enjoying reliving the triumphs of Joe Louis with Peck the sports fan. Still, in the plaintive scenes when Ethel appears cowed by the judgmental husband played by Laughton, there is a life that she gives the character, whose sad and timid eyes, tell the story of a blighted marriage. Later, in the Dostoyevskyian melancholy of the Gregory Peck-Ava Gardner vehicle, The Great Sinner (1949), her brief appearance as the deus ex grandmama who is bitten by gambling fever stops the show, literally. Her brief time on camera is a highlight of a rather lugubrious movie sparkling with some fine character actor turns, topped by Ethel’s appearance to that of the sublime Walter Huston as a profligate bettor, to Agnes Moorehead as a pawnbroker to Frank Morgan as a loser who turns his back on a chance at redemption.

Elia Kazan never struck me as a shrinking violet. He didn’t emerge out of New York’s innovative, often bumptious atmosphere of the Group Theater or the ranks of minor character actors as a powerhouse director by just being polite. Yet, in the late winter of 1949, he was attempting to film Pinky (1949), a 20th Century Fox movie that tackled the story of a young, light-skinned African-American nurse who was passing as white, (played by an overwhelmed, emotionally inexpressive but dignified Jeanne Crain, who tried hard, but was in over her head). Finding himself at a loss to extract what he wanted from Ms. Crain, and–as with many who worked with the legendarily talented yet prickly Ethel Waters, (who played Crain’s grandmother), Kazan was walking on eggshells on the tense set, where he’d replaced an allegedly ailing John Ford. His solace, or so he thought, was the presence in the cast of that other Ethel–Ethel Barrymore, who played the role of the canny, failing patient attended by Crain’s character. Describing her as a “grand old battlewagon, all flags still flying”, Kazan recognized her disdain for anything smacking of the Method’s analytical techniques, but nevertheless, requested repeated takes. Her reaction was a withering “Why? I can’t do it any better, boy.” Pressing her a bit, Ethel gave him pause by asking him “What do you want it for, your collection?”