Ethel Barrymore

Ethel Barrymore: First Lady of the American Theatre

She ended a play called *Sunday* with the line "That's all there is, there isn't any more" — and America kept saying it back to her for thirty years, until it had become a national catchphrase detached from the play that produced it. At nineteen, in England, Winston Churchill proposed to her. She turned him down; she had no interest in being a politician's wife, and she already had a career.

Born Into the Firm

Ethel Mae Blyth was born on 15 August 1879 in Philadelphia, the second child of the actors Maurice Barrymore and Georgiana Drew and the granddaughter of Louisa Lane Drew, an actress and theatre manager. Her brothers were Lionel and John Barrymore; Drew Barrymore is her great-niece. This was less a family than an institution, and the young Ethel was raised inside it — in Philadelphia at Catholic schools, and in England between 1884 and 1886.

The institution offered no cushion. Her mother died of tuberculosis in 1893, and Ethel, still a teenager, left school without finishing to work in the theatre. She never returned to formal education. Her training was the stage itself.

Broadway, 1895

She made her Broadway debut in 1895 in *The Imprudent Young Couple*, and the breakthrough came six years later, in 1901, as Madame Trentoni in *Captain Jinks of the Horse Marines*. That performance turned a member of a famous family into a star in her own right and began the run that earned her the title she carried for the rest of her life: the First Lady of the American Theatre.

The range was deliberately broad. She played Nora in *A Doll's House* in 1905, took on Juliet in *Romeo and Juliet* in 1922 at forty-two, and had one of her greatest successes in *The Constant Wife* in 1926. She was also a fixture of American popular life beyond the theatre — a lifelong baseball enthusiast and a boxing fan until the brutality of the Dempsey–Willard fight on 4 July 1919 put her off the sport for good.

The 1919 Strike

That same summer, Barrymore did the thing that most distinguishes her from her contemporaries. She backed the Actors' Equity strike, alongside Marie Dressler, campaigning for profit-sharing and benefits for performers. She was, by then, among the most bankable names in the American theatre and had everything to lose by siding with the chorus against the producers. The stand cost her the friendship of George M. Cohan. It did not cost her the audience: her post-strike run in *Déclassée* in 1919–20 was a triumph.

Pictures, Late and Then Constantly

Her film career began early and then paused. She made her first feature, *The Nightingale*, in 1914 and appeared in fifteen silent pictures between 1914 and 1919, mostly for Metro. In 1932 she joined Lionel and John in *Rasputin and the Empress*, the only film in which all three Barrymores appeared.

The substantial screen work came in her sixties. She won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for *None but the Lonely Heart* (1944), opposite Cary Grant, and received three further nominations — though she expressed limited enthusiasm about the honour, which fits a woman who had spent five decades being judged nightly by live audiences. She followed it with *The Spiral Staircase* (1946) and *The Paradine Case* (1947), and made her last film, *Johnny Trouble*, in 1957.

She was equally early to the newer media. Her radio debut in May 1923, a broadcast of *The Laughing Lady*, reached roughly 750,000 listeners at a time when the technology was barely commercial. She starred in ABC's *Miss Hattie* in 1944–45, appeared on *All Star Revue* in 1951 and *What's My Line?* in 1952, and hosted fourteen episodes of the DuMont network's *Ethel Barrymore Theatre* in 1956.

A Life Off Stage

She married Russell Griswold Colt on 14 March 1909 and divorced him in 1923. They had three children: Samuel, Ethel Barrymore Colt and John Drew Colt. Besides Churchill, she had been engaged to Laurence Irving, son of the great actor Henry Irving, and did not marry him either. In 1938 she became the first artistic director of the Olney Theatre Center in Maryland.

Why Ethel Is Called a Genius

Barrymore's gift was not intellectual and she had no formal education past her early teens; the claim rests entirely on stagecraft, and it is worth being exact about what that craft consisted of. She had presence — the capacity to hold a large house without raising her voice — and a control of timing precise enough that a single curtain line, "That's all there is, there isn't any more," escaped its play and lodged in the national vocabulary for two decades. That is a measurable effect of delivery rather than of writing. The second component was durability across formats: a career that began on Broadway in 1895 and was still working in silent film, radio in 1923, sound features in the 1940s and network television in 1956 required her to recalibrate the same instrument four times, as each medium demanded a smaller and smaller performance. Very few of her generation managed the transition once; she managed it repeatedly, and won an Oscar doing it at sixty-five.

The counter-case is real. She inherited her platform — the Drews and Barrymores were theatrical royalty, and a Barrymore in 1895 did not audition on equal terms. Her screen roles were largely character parts and grande dames, and her own indifference to the Academy Award suggests she knew the difference between the work she was celebrated for and the work she valued. She originated no technique and left no school. What she left instead was an example of a working actor's authority extended over sixty years, and one act — the 1919 strike — in which she spent that authority on people who had none.

Legacy

Barrymore died of cardiovascular disease in Hollywood on 18 June 1959, two months short of her eightieth birthday. The Ethel Barrymore Theatre, opened in her honour in 1928, is still running on West 47th Street — an unusual monument, since it is not a plaque but a working house where actors are paid under the protections she struck for. She was inducted into the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1960 and the American Theater Hall of Fame, and a crater on Venus carries her name. The dynasty continued through her great-niece Drew. But the phrase is the thing that outlasted everything: five decades of stardom compressed into seven words about knowing when to stop.