Lionel Barrymore was an American actor of stage, screen and radio as well as a film director. He won an Academy Award for Best Actor for his performance in A Free Soul. Barrymore is best known to modern audiences for the role of villainous Mr. Potter in Frank Capra’s 1946 film It’s a Wonderful Life. He is particularly remembered as Ebenezer Scrooge in annual broadcasts of A Christmas Carol during his last two decades.
About Lionel Barrymore in brief
Lionel Barrymore was an American actor of stage, screen and radio as well as a film director. He won an Academy Award for Best Actor for his performance in A Free Soul. Barrymore is best known to modern audiences for the role of villainous Mr. Potter in Frank Capra’s 1946 film It’s a Wonderful Life. He is also particularly remembered as Ebenezer Scrooge in annual broadcasts of A Christmas Carol during his last two decades. He was married twice, to actresses Doris Rankin and Irene Fenwick, a one-time lover of his brother, John. He had two daughters, Ethel Barrymore II and Mary Barrymore. Neither child survived infancy. He later developed a fatherly affection for Jean Harlow, who was born about the same time as his daughters. When Harlow died in 1937, Barrymore and Clark Gable mourned her as though she had been family. He appeared on Broadway in his early twenties with his uncle John Drew Jr. in such plays as The Second in Command and The Mummy and the Hummingbird, the latter of which won him critical acclaim. After the First World War, he had several successes on Broadway, where he established his reputation as a dramatic actor. He returned to the stage with his wife Peter Ionets, from 1910 to 1917, while heestablished his film career. He also joined his family’s vaudeville act, Peter I on the stage from 1912 to 1917. He died in New York City on December 31, 1973.
He left behind a wife, two daughters and a son. He never remarried and died in a nursing home in New Jersey in 1978. He leaves behind a son, Peter, and a daughter, Mary, who he had with his second wife, Doris, who died in 1994. He has three grandchildren and one great-grandchild. He will be buried in Mount Vernon, New York, on the banks of the New Jersey Turnpike. His great-great-grandson is actor John Drew Barrymore, who is also his great-nephew. He played Dr. Leonard Gillespie in MGM’s nine Dr. Kildare films, a role he reprised in a further six films focusing solely on Gillespie and in a radio series titled The Story of Dr. Kildare. In his autobiography, We Barrymores, Lionel confirms in his autobiography that he and Doris were in France when Bleriot flew the English Channel on July 25, 1909. He did not achieve success as a painter, and in 1909 he returned to US. In December of that year, he left the stage in The Fire of Fate, in Chicago, but left the production later that month after suffering an attack of nerves about the forthcoming opening of the forthcoming film. He continued his stage career with several plays, including The Jail in 1910 and The Bird in Bird’s Tale. In 1913, he appeared in The Second In Command, in which he played the title character in Pantaloon.
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