Drew Barrymore’s storied theatrical American heritage began some 200 years ago when her great-great-grandmother, Louisa Lane, left England on a steamship with her widowed mother. Descended from acting eminences since c. 1000, Louisa married John Drew, an Irish comic actor, and bore him three children including Drew Barrymore’s great grandmother, Georgiana Emma Drew (“Georgie”). A gifted comic actress, Georgina wed a jaunty Englishman, Maurice Barrymore, who became a matinee idol after he came to America 150 years ago this Christmas. From this match flowed her three “command performances,” Lionel, Ethel, and John, Drew Barrymore’s grandfather, who married actress Dolores Costello, and gave birth John Drew Barrymore, father of future E.T. (1982) star Drew.
The family, of course, branched into film soon after its birth at the dawn of the last century. Two films, 80 years apart, both starring Barrymores, are hidden screen gems worth another look.
Rasputin and the Empress(1932)
This is the only film to feature the “Barrymore Royal Family.”
John and Lionel had hightailed it to Hollywood first, though Ethel had also given it a whirl early on. By 1932, as the Depression was cutting into Broadway ticket sales, she responded favorably when MGM head of production, Irving Thalberg, invited her to make Rasputin and the Empress with Lionel and John.
“It was a lack of a suitable story that kept Ethel Barrymore away from the cinema all these years,” the New York Times reported. Ethel had met the Czarina and so had special insight in how to play her. Lionel had his own take. “Ethel,” he wrote in his 1951 memoir, “scorned the cinema as a Metropolitan diva might scorn hog calling. It was her opinion, which she stated crisply on many occasions, that her brothers were in cahoots with sidewalk venders and honky-tonk operators.” Nonetheless, “(s)ix companies attempted to sign Miss Barrymore. And their efforts continued until her arrival.”
One New York Times welcome interviewer, wrote Lionel, asked Ethel “if she thought she would be nervous appearing in the talkies with two such experienced scene stealers as her brothers. Jack interrupted him. ‘You need not worry about Mrs. Colt… Our sister Ethel will be standing right before the camera—in front of us.’” In reality, it took some doing, to her brothers’ amusement, for her to feel comfortable talking to a camera in the infancy of talking pictures.
A timely classic
Rasputin and the Empress is actually quite timely. It is thestory of how Grigory Rasputin gained influence over Russian politics and the royal Romanov family, particularly Czarina Alexandra in her husband’s absence during World War I. Rasputin was murdered on December 30, 1916, leading to the Russian Revolution; a new provisional government; and Czar Nicholas II’s abdication of the throne on March 15, 1917, ending 300 years of Romanov rule. The Bolsheviks toppled the government on November 7, 1917, during the year’s Second Russian Revolution, leading to Civil War and execution of the Romanovs on July 16, 1918, and became the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1922.
Some 100 years later, our world is still grappling with the effects of atheistic communism.
Big Miracle (2012)
This is a good place to pivot to the film, Big Miracle (2012), starring Drew Barrymore 80 years later. For, if ever our world needs a big miracle, it’s now!
The film is a gem, and quite hidden; for, in spite of Barrymore’s star power, it only rang up about $20 million at the box office (US and Canada) or half its budget. Set in the small Alaskan town of Barrow, a news reporter recruits his environmental activist ex-girlfriend, Rachel Cramer, played by Barrymore, who embarks upon a campaign to save a family of three gray whales trapped by walls of ice six inches thick in the Arctic Circle. Rachel shows great political savvy and great heart for these threatened mammals.
Ironically, a Soviet icebreaking machine ultimately frees them. When the Army officer says, “I’ll be damned if I’m going to let the Reds in to save the day,” Cramer responds, “Then those whales are going to die, even though they’re big and powerful. They’re so much like us. We’re vulnerable. We get scared. And we need help sometimes, too.”
She could not state the circumstances now facing our vulnerable world any better. Yes, we need a miracle!
Then, too, she makes her Drew and Barrymore ancestors, looking down from Heaven, proud!
Mary Claire Kendall’s latest book, 'Oasis of Faith: The Souls Behind the Billboard—Barrymore, Cagney, Tracy, Stewart, Guinness & Lemmon,' has just been published.
