Lionel Barrymore
actor, director, writer
- Birth name:
- Lionel Herbert Blythe
- Born:
- 1878-04-28, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA
- Died:
- 1954-11-15, Van Nuys, California, USA
- Professions:
- actor, director, writer
Biography
Lionel Barrymore refused to stay inside the lines of a single canvas. Between takes on sets that stretched from Griffith’s silent era to the talkies’ golden age, he painted symphonies instead of still-lifes, turning blank scores into the restless “Russian Dances,” the moonlit “Ballet Viennois,” and a one-act opera, “Farewell Symphony,” that bows out like a curtain drop on a dying season. 1944 found him welcomed into ASCAP’s fold, his catalog already thick with mischief-makers such as “Scherzo Grotesque” and elegies voiced by lone oboes. When the cameras cooled, he swapped baton for pen, dispatching the satirical novel Mr. Cartonwine: A Moral Tale and, later, his own life in frank autobiography. Actor, composer, painter, author, director—Barrymore simply kept inventing new rooms in the same house of art.
Filmography
In the vault (74)
