John Barrymore — Actor, The Great Profile and the Great Squandering

Biography

From the Barrymore Dynasty to The Great Profile's Ruin

Born John Sidney Blyth Barrymore on February 15, 1882, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania — the son of Maurice Barrymore and Georgiana Drew, both celebrated stage actors, the brother of Lionel and Ethel Barrymore, and therefore a member of what was universally acknowledged as the first family of the American theatre. The dynasty was a gift and a burden: the expectation was formed before the actor was, and the actor spent his career simultaneously inhabiting and escaping it.

His early career was largely in light comedy — he was better looking than his talent required him to be, and the theatre was content to use the looks without the intelligence beneath them. The intelligence emerged in 1920, when his Richard III on Broadway established him as the finest classical actor in America, and confirmed in 1922 with his Hamlet — 101 consecutive performances, a record that stood until John Gielgud broke it in 1936 — which critics compared favourably with any Hamlet of the previous century and which he left to make silent films rather than tour, a decision his later self would recognise as the first of many choices against his own best interests.

Hollywood received him with the awe due a classical actor of the first rank, and he repaid the reception with a series of performances that demonstrated his screen gifts were equal to his stage gifts: more naturalistic, more intimate, more aware of what the camera could find in a face that even the gods had designed with unusual care. Edmund Goulding's Grand Hotel (1932) — opposite Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford, Wallace Beery, and Lionel Barrymore — and Howard Hawks' Twentieth Century (1934) are the peaks: the first a romantic drama of exceptional elegance, the second a screwball comedy of such complete physical and verbal abandon that it invented a genre.

The decline was spectacular and documented. Alcohol removed the memory first — by the late 1930s he was reading lines from cue cards pinned around the set — then the physical instrument, then the ability to appear in any production that required sustained effort. He died on May 29, 1942, in Hollywood, aged sixty. His friends sent his body to Errol Flynn's house the night before the funeral, propped it up, and let Flynn find it in the morning, which was the kind of tribute only Barrymore's friends could have devised and that he would have found entirely appropriate.

1882

Born in Philadelphia; Barrymore dynasty; the weight of expectation

1920

Richard III on Broadway; the finest classical actor in America, suddenly visible

1922

Hamlet — 101 performances; record; then Hollywood instead of tour

1932

Grand Hotel — Garbo, Crawford, Lionel; the peak Hollywood year

1934

Twentieth Century — Hawks; screwball genius; the last sustained peak

Late 1930s

Cue cards; alcohol; the instrument failing; the legend consolidating

1942

Dies aged 60; Flynn receives the body; the tribute was appropriate

Stage & Screen

From Hamlet's Prince to Oscar Jaffe's Train

1922Shakespeare · Broadway · 101 Performances

Hamlet

His 1922 Broadway Hamlet — 101 consecutive performances, a record that stood for fourteen years — was universally acknowledged as the greatest American Hamlet of the century. He played it at forty, which is a decade older than the character, and the maturity was an advantage: the intelligence Hamlet requires was in him in a way it rarely is in younger actors, and the beauty was still there to make it bearable.

Stage Record

Critics in 1922 reached for Shakespeare's own contemporaries to find adequate comparisons — Burbage was mentioned, which is either the highest compliment or the most extravagant hyperbole, depending on your confidence in theatrical memory across three centuries. What is not in doubt is that the production established a standard against which every subsequent American Hamlet has been measured and most found wanting. He left for Hollywood rather than tour the production, a decision he spent the rest of his life explaining and never satisfactorily explaining.

1934Screwball Comedy · Howard Hawks · Carole Lombard

Twentieth Century

Howard Hawks' screwball masterpiece — Barrymore as Oscar Jaffe, the megalomaniac Broadway impresario pursuing his estranged leading lady (Carole Lombard) from New York to Chicago on the Twentieth Century Limited. The performance that invented the screwball comedy and demonstrated that his gifts for physical comedy were equal to his gifts for tragedy — possibly superior, since tragedy required restraint and screwball comedy rewarded the absolute removal of it.

Oscar Jaffe is a monument to grandiose self-deception — a man who has constructed such a complete mythology of his own importance that he has lost all contact with any reality that doesn't confirm it — and Barrymore plays him with a physical and verbal abandon that could only have come from an actor who had already proved he could do the other thing. The train scenes — Jaffe pursuing Lombard's Lily Garland through the carriages, scheming, declaiming, threatening, pleading — are the funniest sustained performance in 1930s Hollywood, and they required Barrymore to deploy the same instrument that had played Hamlet twelve years earlier in an entirely different direction.

1932Drama · Edmund Goulding · All-Star Ensemble

Grand Hotel

Edmund Goulding's ensemble drama — Barrymore as Baron Felix von Gaigern, the charming jewel thief who falls in love with Garbo's exhausted ballerina in a Berlin luxury hotel. Opposite his brother Lionel, opposite Garbo, opposite Crawford — the most distinguished ensemble in studio-era Hollywood — and the performance that proved the screen gifts were as complete as the stage gifts.

The Baron's courtship of Grusinskaya — the gentle persistence of a man whose charm is genuine rather than calculated, who recognises in the exhausted dancer something that cannot be acquired and cannot be performed — is the most romantic thing Barrymore put on screen, and the most restrained. Against the extravagance of his stage reputation and the coming extravagance of Oscar Jaffe, the Baron's quiet warmth is the evidence that the instrument's range was as wide as his admirers claimed. He and Garbo filmed their scenes privately, after hours, because she found public performance difficult; the result is unlike anything in the rest of the film.

1931Drama · Archie Mayo · Silent-to-Sound Transition

Svengali

Archie Mayo's Gothic melodrama — Barrymore as Svengali, the hypnotist who enslaves the singer Trilby. The film that demonstrated what the camera could do with the Barrymore face at its most theatrically expressionist — the profile, the eyes, the capacity for sinister grandeur — in a role designed specifically to exploit every physical quality he possessed.

Svengali requires an actor whose physical presence is so complete that the hypnosis is plausible — whose eyes alone can communicate a will that overrides the will of others — and Barrymore's face, particularly in close-up, delivers exactly that. The film was made at the moment when he was still in full command of all his powers, and it is the purest demonstration of what the Profile could do when the Profile was all the role required.

Recognition

The Greatest Hamlet of His Century — And the Greatest Waste

The 1922 Hamlet Record

1922

101 Consecutive Performances

His Broadway Hamlet ran for 101 consecutive performances — a record for the role in America, broken by John Gielgud in 1936. Critics placed it alongside the greatest Hamlets of any era. He left to make films rather than tour it, which he later identified as the first significant act of self-sabotage in a career organised around them.

American Record

The Great Profile

1882 — 1942

The Most Celebrated Profile in Theatre History

The Barrymore profile — the aquiline nose, the jaw, the angle at which the face presented itself to a camera or an audience — was so celebrated that it became a theatrical shorthand for physical magnificence. Directors staged productions to feature it; photographers built careers around it; and Barrymore himself treated it as a separate entity, occasionally referring to it in the third person.

The Great Profile

The Barrymore Dynasty

Three Generations

Ethel · Lionel · John

The Barrymore siblings — Ethel, Lionel, and John — constituted the most distinguished theatrical family in American history. All three appeared in Grand Hotel (1932). All three received major Hollywood recognition. The dynasty continued through Drew Barrymore; the genes, apparently, are persistent.

The Royal Family

The Magnificent Waste

Late Career

Cue Cards and Legend

By the late 1930s he was reading his lines from cue cards pinned around the set — alcohol having removed the memory that had held the 101 Hamlets. The decline was as spectacular as the ascent, and as well documented. The legend required both, which is the most uncomfortable possible argument about the relationship between genius and its destruction.

The Great Squandering

The Legend

The Profile — The Genius — The Deliberate Ruin

The Classical Instrument

His Richard III and Hamlet represented a classical technique of the first rank — the voice, the movement, the ability to sustain and modulate a character across a full Shakespeare evening — that Hollywood largely did not require and therefore gradually eroded through disuse. The camera needed the face and the immediate intelligence; it didn't need, and couldn't use, the instrument that had held the Globe's equivalent for 101 consecutive nights.

The Self-Destruction

The alcohol is not incidental to the legend but constitutive of it — the choice that the legend requires, the price the myth demands. Barrymore made the choices consciously: he knew what the drinking was doing, said so repeatedly with considerable wit, and continued. The self-awareness makes the destruction more complex rather than less: it was not weakness but a decision, which is harder to explain and more interesting to contemplate.

The Comic Genius

Twentieth Century demonstrates that his gifts for physical comedy were equal to his tragic gifts — possibly greater, since comedy requires an actor to be simultaneously in and outside the character, playing both the seriousness the character takes itself with and the absurdity the audience sees. Oscar Jaffe's self-deception requires exactly this double consciousness, and Barrymore plays it with a freedom that only an actor who has proved he can do the tragic thing allows himself in comedy.

The Funeral Story

His friends — Errol Flynn among them — arranged to have the body delivered to Flynn's house the night before the funeral and propped it up for Flynn to find in the morning. The story may or may not be true. What matters is that it circulates as true, that Barrymore's friends considered it appropriate, and that Barrymore himself, in every account of his personality, would have found it hilarious. The legend chose the right man.

Legacy

The Greatest Instrument — Deliberately Unmaintained

John Barrymore's legacy is the 1922 Hamlet and the cue cards — the two ends of the arc that the legend requires. The finest classical actor of his American generation produced the greatest Shakespeare performance of the century's first half, then made a sustained set of choices against his own best interests that ended with him reading his lines from cards pinned to other actors' foreheads.

The waste is inseparable from the achievement; the legend required both. What is clear across the distance of eighty years is that the talent was real — that Twentieth Century and Grand Hotel and the 1922 Hamlet record are not the work of a man who could have been great but wasn't, but the work of a man who was great and chose, with complete self-awareness, to spend it.

Hamlet Performances

Broadway 1922 — American record

101

Years of Major Career

1920 to 1936, then decline

Marriages

Committed as fully as everything else

Age at Death

May 29, 1942, Hollywood