And then there was John Barrymore, born in 1882, who was widely considered the greatest actor of his generation and possibly of his century. He had a profile so famously perfect that he was referred to throughout his career simply as “The Great Profile,” and a Shakespearean stage presence that critics exhausted their superlatives attempting to describe. His Hamlet in 1922 was a cultural event. His Richard III was transformative. He was, by all available evidence, a genius of the stage.
He was also an alcoholic who began drinking seriously at fourteen. He died in 1942, aged sixty, of cirrhosis of the liver.
John Barrymore’s self-destruction was not a private misery. It played out in the full glare of public attention, as did his various marriages and the turbulence of his personal life. He reportedly said at various points that he considered acting a kind of curse rather than a vocation — a gift he had been handed and could not return, that gave him everything and seemed to take more. By the end of his life, the man who had defined a generation’s understanding of what acting could be was a physical and psychological ruin, his talent submerged under decades of dependence.
Drew Barrymore was John Barrymore’s granddaughter.
Her father, John Drew Barrymore, was born in 1932 and was, by most accounts, a genuinely talented actor whose career was limited by exactly the same forces that had undermined his father’s: alcohol, drugs, and a seemingly constitutional inability to sustain the professional commitments that his ability should have made routine. He appeared in films through the 1950s and 1960s but never achieved the prominence that his lineage seemed to promise. By the time his daughter was born in 1975, he was an intermittent presence at best.