Her granddaughter through performance, Georgie Drew, married an Englishman named Herbert Blythe, born in Fort Agra, India, in 1849, who had come to America and reinvented himself on the stage under the name Maurice Barrymore. The name was borrowed; the talent was genuine. Maurice Barrymore became a celebrated actor known for his presence and his charm, and also for his inability to manage either his personal life or his health. He died in 1905 in a sanitarium, suffering from what contemporary accounts described in the delicate vocabulary of the era as a degenerative illness — one that modern understanding recognizes as likely a late-stage consequence of syphilis. He was fifty-five.
His three children became, together, the first family of the American stage. Lionel Barrymore, born in 1878, was the eldest and perhaps the most versatile — he acted on stage and screen, directed, composed music, and eventually won the Academy Award for Best Actor for his performance in A Free Soul in 1931. When arthritis confined him to a wheelchair in his later years, he continued performing, becoming perhaps most enduringly famous to subsequent generations as the villainous Mr. Potter in Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life, a role of such concentrated malevolence that audiences have been hissing at him for decades.
Ethel Barrymore, born in 1879, was called “The First Lady of American Theatre” and earned that title across nearly six decades of performance. Her Broadway debut in 1894 led to a stage career of remarkable range and endurance. She won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for None but the Lonely Heart in 1944 and continued working into the 1950s. Her discipline and her longevity were exceptional even within the family.