Ethel Barrymore Gallery 

"All I care about is to be a good actress." Ethel Barrymore 1902.

In front of us, standing easily under the studio window, Miss Ethel Barrymore unconsciously makes a picture, until the photographers says, "Kindly let your left hand fall over the right edge of the third fold of your gown"--and before he can say "thank you," she has become conscious of the pose and murmurs between her teeth: "I am so hopeless in photographs."

But she isn't, not a bit of it; she doesn't know what hopelessness even means, for she is the embodiment of that sweet assurance one senses in the rigid strength of a fresh young rosebud, with its crips youth just unfolding the hidden glories of its lovely destiny. Pictorially, Miss Barrymore suggest this, and she speaks with the authority of two generations of celebrities in her blood. She had a wonderful grandmother, Mrs. John Drew--a brilliant executive woman; she had a mother whom she considers the greatest high-comedy actress of the American stage, Georgia Drew Barrymore; and who has touched more hearts, withhis wonderful voice, and made young blood thrill with manliness and high sentiment more buoyantly in the theater than her father--he who will always be a stage ideal Maurice Barrymore?

But, apart from these relationships, Miss Barrymore is a distinct individuality in herself. "Yes, I'm twenty-three; and if some sort of success had not come pretty soon, I don't know what would have become of me!" she said, seriously. "It's awful how soon we get old!...Well, it's all very nice to laugh about it, but you can't play young girls' parts if you're not young, you know." Rosalind, for instance, would not be interesting if she were playing an old hag!"  At the age of 23 Drew Barrymore produced her own movie. The acting ability in the Barrymore family most definitely runs in the genes.

"The first chance I had for a part was with Sir Henry Irving in 'Peter the Great," in London, but I wasn't good in it!" What? " No, I wasn't; it was an adventuress part, you know, and did not really suit me. You see, I was only seventeen, and did not know much about that kind of thing..." So you like London? "Very much indeed." She was asked "Better than New York." "In some ways I do; it seems as though you meet great people in London, men who are doing things in national affairs, and so on...In New York the great men don't seem to be about, they don't go out so much, they are more difficult to meet."

You're fond of society?"

"I have a great many friends in society--but that doesn't matter, I like them just as well...I used to be very fond of going to balls,..When I was in my teens, you know I had more time then. You see, I really haven't the time now!" Of course not, you have worldly success to consider." Ethel responds "Worldly success does not interest me."

You would like to play Rosalind?"

"Yes--and Lady Teazle, quite another vein of comedy. I don't know that I aspire to Shakespeare, but I should like to play modern parts. For instance, the new piece I am in 'A Country Mouse.'

There was a time, at the age of fourteen or thereabouts when Miss Barrymore was intended by her parents for a musical career, primarily because she was a talented pianist, and essentially because they did not want her to go on the stage. In those days she played classical music. "I don't play classical music now; I did all that when I was fourteen..I'm fond of Russian music, Hungarian dances, the wildness and melancholy of the Eastern poets!"

Somehow or other the word romantic drifted into our chat, and Miss Barrymore confessed to close affiliation with everything that had romance in it. "I've written a play, you know...a very serious one-act thing." Written recently? "No, that is why it is rather morbid, I suppose; I wrote it when I was very young!"

"I've had women say to me, "Why, you are not a bit like an actress! and believe that they were paying me a compliment." What do you answer them? "I express my regrets. I am always sorry when anyone tells me I am not an actress."

When Ethel was a child she had a French nurse and spoke French as if it were her native tongue. Ethel said: "When we were all children, we used to invent unknown languages of our own, to converse in. Then I had a French nurse, and I studied languages at the convent in Philadelphia."

You know my brother, is quite a busy cartoonist on one of the evening newspapers.

Miss Ethel Barrymore is a wholesome American girl; independent because of her inherent strength, intellectual in her interests, refined in her tastes, and an arch-enemy of humbugs and shams. It was quite natural that people should say to her she does not look like an actress, because actresses of her quality are conservative, and people rarely see them publicly off the stage.

She has the charm of naturalness, that is so unusal on the modern stage, and while at first glance she is pretty, she becomes positively handsome in the glow of her splendid breadth of vision, which, of course, is the soul of wit. Her eight "long years" on the stage have not left a false mark in her nature, and never will, because, as she says, "It seems as though I have been at it since the flood," and because the theatre is to her as the garden is to the rosebud--love and life." W. de Wagstaffe.

Ethel Barrymore and her brother, John Barrymore

From a photograph taken in October 1906 on Catalina Island, California. John is asking his sister if he may be her leading man next season, to which Miss Ethel replies: "O Jack, don't be silly, I've such a headache!" In twenty years John would make motion picture history by acting in Don Juan first film to contain sound.