Ethel Barrymore

Let’s be honest—when most of us think of Ethel Barrymore, who remember her at all, we think of her not by face or voice or performance but from Gene Kelly’s sarcastic delivery of the name in Singin’ in the Rain. She had done a dozen or so films in the silent era, but she’d mostly stopped in 1919, long before the movie’s 1927 setting. She was, for many years, a stage actress. One of the best, hence the reference. Certainly one of the most noteworthy. There is no actress from that era half so remembered, and it’s not just because she’s a member of a longstanding dynasty.

She did start acting because of the dynasty, of course. Though it seems it’s also partially because of the early death of her mother in 1893, when Ethel was fourteen. Ethel’s Broadway debut was two years later. It was alongside her uncle, John Drew. She then went to London, where she was a phenomenal success. She drew the attention of a wide range of men, from W. Somerset Maugham to Winston Churchill. The Shuberts named a theatre after her, which still bears her name. There’s a reason she’s name-checked in a movie set in 1927.

She did eventually make her way to Hollywood like the rest of the family; her silent films were primarily made on the East Coast, where she lived and cared for her children. Any number of her silent performances are lost; that’s the unfortunate truth when it comes to silent films, after all. But while she was hardly a young woman when she started performing in talkies, there was still a lot to be said for them; she did, after all, win an Oscar for a movie I haven’t gotten around to watching yet. (Cary Grant dramas from that era are so turgid, after all, and apparently she herself agreed.) She would be nominated three more times.

She also made some early television. Little of that survives; it’s the way of early television just as it is of silent movies. The history of television and radio, both of which she did work on, are fragmentary and best and in many cases simply lost, as neither medium was seen as worthy of preservation. It is, however, delightful that her Suspense appearance was alongside none other than Gene Kelly himself. She had her own show on the DuMont network on TV, and basically nothing from that network survives. Too bad; it sounds fascinating.

She was, in fact, a good union woman. She was a supporter of Equity, and she was one of the prominent figures in the 1919 strike. It cost her her friendship with George M. Cohan, it seems, but I have no doubt she considered it worthwhile. Her mother had died in part from a lack of care. Her father had, it seems, suffered from late-stage syphilis and spent years in Bellevue. Ethel had paid for his care herself, which she could afford by that point but shouldn’t have had to do. Ethel would have been ashamed of a family member who crossed picket lines.