Lionel Barrymore

When I was a child, it simply never occurred to me to wonder why Mr. Potter was in a wheelchair. He was because he was. The woman who lived across the street was in a wheelchair, too; I think possible she’d had polio. There were a couple of kids I got to know through school in wheelchairs. It was, for me, fairly normalized. I was probably in my thirties before I found out that, by 1946, you put Lionel Barrymore in a wheelchair or you didn’t cast him at all. In fact, Frank Capra had been the last person to have a non-wheelchair performance out of Barrymore, in 1938’s You Can’t Take It With You. And that was on crutches.

The Barrymore dynasty predates Lionel. The first acting Barrymore was born approximately 1759. He was unrelated. However, Herbert Arthur Chamberlayn Blyth took the name from him and became Maurice Barrymore. (Apparently he liked the French pronunciation, which his friends dodged by calling him “Barry.”) Maurice married Georgiana Drew, an actress and descendant of actresses. Lionel was their eldest son, and he initially wanted to . . . paint. He first appeared on stage with his own grandmother, Louisa Lane Drew, at age fifteen.

He actually did take a stretch to try to be a painter. He wasn’t successful, though I’m far from an expert and wonder if that’s as much because of changing tastes as anything. His art was intricate—the style is very different, but the amount of background detail reminds me of a Miyazaki film. The lines tended to be a bit heavy, but honestly a book illustrated by Barrymore would’ve been well worth the price of purchase. His colour sense wasn’t the greatest, but I like his sense of space.

And unlike some failed artists, he just found another job, in his case going back into the family business. His star really began to rise during the sound era, where his voice could be an asset. Barrymore was a busy man; his film career started in 1905, and over the next fifty-one years he made well over two hundred films. Oh, sure, no few of them were shorts, but his character from Dr. Kildare took over the series after Lew Ayres was fired, eventually appearing in fifteen films. Not to mention the radio show. And that’s on top of stone-cold classics like It’s a Wonderful Life and Key Largo.

Picking The Most Talented Barrymore is a fool’s game. How do you even choose? Picking the most versatile one may not seem fair to Drew, who is after all still alive and might do new things at any time. However, her great-uncle Lionel was not merely a talented actor in a family of talented actor but a pretty decent painter. He also composed, and I’m here to tell you I’ve played worse music than his “In Memoriam John Barrymore,” which I’m listening to as I type. He was a powerhouse, enough that people put characters into wheelchairs so he could play them.