John Barrymore Gallery 

by Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.

"He rarely stops acting under any circumstance. When he does he is delightful. He has no conceit but rather a feeling of gross inferiority. He thinks that he is an atrocious actor and that his success mainly due to certain attractive angles of his face. He thinks his brother Lionel is the greatest of all actors...His manner gives one the impression of a soul that has turned bitter. This is not entirely the case. He is a dreamer whose dreams became too true to be good...He is curious composite of saint and devil. There are few men about whom there has been more vicious gossip. He is reputed to have witnessed and indulged in every known vice. He is discussed as being happiest when in an unbathed condition. He is said to be the most conceited man ever to appear before the public eye. Far be it from me to appoint myself a judge of anyone's character, but association has taught me several revealing facts about this man whom so many condemn without righteousness but with some cause. He is a man who, from his youth was surrounded by people older than himself; it is for that reason that he met and recognized at an early age the ironic side of life...He makes himself disliked for the purpose of keeping people away from him but once he knows their worth his friendship knows no bounds. He is grateful to old friends and is interested in many unprinted charities....He can look half his age one day and twice his age the next...He is a chap whom most men like and most women hate. He can look like a tramp or like a fashion plate, or like a king. He is a Magnifico of the Middle Ages, transposed by a sumpreme and happy gesture to the screen of to-day."

 
     

John Barrymore scores a long run with Hamlet at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket, London

Here is a backstage portrait of JOhn Barryore, at the beginning of his engagement there as the Prince of Denmark. The outstanding fact in connection with his English season has been the somewhat grudging praise accorded him by his critics. The English people has accepted him wholeheartedly as an actor of the first magnitude, so wholeheartedly in fact that, for the first twenty performances, curtain speeches by him were the order of the day. 1925.

 
John Barrymore and Mary Astor were planning to appear in the film of "Paolo and Francesca. This photograph shows the two "million-dollar profiles" of filmdom in an idyllic moment before the studio camera.    
John Barrymore Draws, and Acts, Villon. When E.H. Sothern first appeared if I Were King, twenty-five years ago, Daniel Frohman commissioned young Jack Barrymore, a newspaper cartoonist of small success, to draw the poster for the play, which concerned the romantic adventures of Francoios Villion. The poster did not make John Barrymore a famous illustrator, but it helped, perhaps, to make an actor of him, for, not more than a year later, Daniel Frohman introduced him to Broadway. But Mr. Barrymore was still so intrigued by the legend of the fifteenth century poet and roustabout that he soon made a painting of Francois Villion which served as an illustration for Robert Louis Stevenson's take of the vagabond rhymster, A Loding for the Night. Barrymore has rediscovered Villion in his most recent motion picture, John Barrymore is Master Villon, the v illain who was always a hero.

 

John Barrymore plays in "The Man from Blankley's" his second talking film

 
John Barrymore from film Don Juan plays the father of Don Jose, the father of Don Juan. John Barrymore returning to his more traditional romancing in a motion picture version of Lord Byron's Don Juan. In the prologue, Mr. Barrymore is seen as Don Jose, the father, whose talent for sentimental adventure almost led him into the divorce courts. Don Juan inherits his father's tastes in an exaggerated form. As Don Jose, Mr. Barrymore appears as a bearded grandee, who, if he had begun his career before he was burdened with handicaps of a wife and middle age, might have achieved posthumous fame as a great lover. As Don Juan, the son, Mr. Barrymore is a courtly cavalier, whose life is a prolonged fete of "wine, women and song."