Ethel Barrymore: An acting legend who was aided by faith

Ethel Barrymore was born 145 years ago on the Feast of the Assumption.

Besides being a great actress with a great heart, she was a Catholic convert and a woman of deep faith. As she famously said, “When life knocks you to your knees… well, that’s the best position in which to pray…”

She hailed from two great theatrical families, the Drews and the Barrymores.

“My father was the very first of his family to go on the stage,” Ethel told British Movietone News in 1936 “while, on my mother’s side, the Drew family have been on the stage in an unbroken line for over a thousand years since the days in England…”

Unsurprisingly, she was the great-aunt of actress Drew Barrymore and was one of the brightest lights on Broadway when the Great White Way was the premier theatrical venue, film in its infancy.

Her brothers Lionel and John also went on to become acclaimed actors. While Lionel dutifully joined the family business, though not before trying out painting in Paris, John required a little more prodding from Ethel. She could see that Barrymore talent. John famously played Hamlet in 1922, at the same time his siblings were gracing the Broadway stage, thus earning them the moniker “The Royal Family.”

Lionel and John soon decamped to Hollywood. John made his mark in the Silent Film era, starring in Don Juan (1926), the first film with a musical score and sound effects; and Lionel famously imprinting himself on our consciousnesses in many classic film roles such as that of Captain Disko Troop in Captains Courageous and Henry F. Potter, the robber baron villain, in Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life (1946).

As a child, Ethel would travel with her working theatrical parents, Maurice and “Georgie” Drew Barrymore, joined by Lionel. One time, the family went on tour with Madame Helene Modjeska, a famed Polish actress.

“The boy was always busy painting ships and railroad trains, and Ethel was an actress,” wrote Madame Modjeska in her memoir, of Lionel, age four, and Ethel, age three. “They composed some impossible dialogues and played them together. Lionel was always ‘Pap,’ and Ethel was Madame. She could not pronounce all the letters of the alphabet, but she acted with conviction...”

John, an infant at the time of the Modjeska theatrical tour, had stayed home with his acting eminence grandmother, who would impress upon each child, their other longings notwithstanding, that they had a rich theatrical heritage it was their duty to uphold. Not unlike royal duty.

Not long after her father’s recovery from a near fatal shooting, “there came a magic day,” Ethel wrote in her memoir, when this “most charming and entrancing woman,” Madame Modjeska, a “devout Catholic,” from Krakow, Poland, entered their lives.

Her specialty was Shakespearean and tragic roles and Ethel’s parents worshiped her.

Ethel caught her first glimpse of Madame Modjeska when the family traveled on her “private train coach” for a theatrical tour of As You Like It. For four-year-old Ethel, the plays and her parents’ acting in subordinate roles are vague.

But, “Madam Modjeska,” she wrote “was stamped on my mind and heart indelibly for my life, and my gratitude is unbounded.” 

Her mother, wrote Ethel, gradually realized that “she must be a Catholic, too.  So suddenly Lionel and I were surprised to be baptized again.”

It happened in April 1884 in New York City just prior to the tour’s western swing.

Jack, age two, at home with Mummum, as Lionel dubbed his grandmother, “escaped for the time being,” Ethel wrote.

Not a decade later, when their mother tragically died, Ethel, just 13, became a mother to her two siblings, and had to abandon her dreams of becoming a concert pianist to make her living in the family business. It was hard work, and within the decade, her father, who had been a matinee idol, lost his mind and was committed to an asylum, but not before he had the chance to visit her backstage on the night of one of her great triumphs and bring her roses, and shed tears of joy and pathos.

Ethel would marry and bear three children with a husband who was initially great fun but also had great flaws. The marriage did not last but her children were her shining glory. She believed in the indissolubility of marriage and never remarried, as Cardinal Patrick Hayes of New York had requested. Though, she was somewhat amused by the request, given what she had endured.

She moved to California in early 1944 to be closer to Lionel and for California’s warm weather. She had definitively left the stage and would soon win a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for None But the Lonely Heart (1944).

By the fall of 1946, she had also begun to do TV and radio. including readings of the “Passion Story from St. Matthew” each Easter for Fr. Peyton’s Family Theatre (1947-1957). Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, she wrote, were, besides all the classic writers, among her favorites. Protestants as well as Catholics inundated her with thousands of letters, “including one,” she wrote, “that deeply touched me from (Pulitzer Prize winning author) M.A. De Wolfe Howe,” who said, “although he had thought he had been hearing St. Matthew all his life, he had never really heard him before.”

Ailing from arthritic rheumatism and advanced cardiovascular disease for years, she was essentially confined to bed the last 18 months of her life.  Katharine Hepburn would bring her fresh flowers almost every day. “I think she had a great faith in something… I used to sit there and talk to her and then I would go away. But I’d always come back,” said Hepburn.

On the evening of June 18, 1959, at 8 o’ clock on the dot, the audience at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre a coast away awaited the curtain’s rise on Raisin in the Sun, the lights dimmed in silent tribute to the last of “The Royal Family.” That morning, on the opposite coast, Ethel had breathed her last at her humble Beverly Hills home. She was preceded in death by John and Lionel, who had left this world in 1942 and 1954, respectively, and her husband, Russell Griswold Colt, who had breathed his last six months earlier. On her grave, she had engraved “Ethel Barrymore Colt.”

Ethel Barrymore had now left the goldfish bowl for the pearly gates — but not before she “lifted the standards of American acting,” one critic famously said.

Her story and that of her siblings, full of such triumph and tragedy, and much faith, is told in newly-published Oasis of Faith: The Souls Behind the Billboard, excerpted herein.