Ethel Barrymore (1879-1959)
Filed under the name Ethel · March 1, 2026
There's a whole family of Barrymores in the acting business, but this one was the matriarch of it, and reading about her long career on stage and screen reminded me of the grandmothers who used to run our little community theater productions back home — the ones everybody deferred to without anybody ever quite saying why. She earned an Academy Award to go with decades of respect from her peers, which in my experience is the harder thing to earn. I had a student once, a shy little girl named Etta Mae, who used to recite poems in front of the class shaking like a leaf, and I always told her that stage fright never fully leaves the good ones, it just gets dressed up nicer. I imagine Miss Barrymore knew that feeling every night of her career and walked out anyway. My late husband Rusty used to say the bravest people aren't the ones without nerves, just the ones who go on regardless. Seems like she did that for a very long time, and did it well.