Sidney Drew

Biography

Shipboard fog or Manhattan snow? Even the calendar shrugs: Sidney Drew’s birthday drifts somewhere between 1862 and 1867, depending on which aunt or affidavit you trust. His mother, left solo while her husband barn-stormed across continents, liked to murmur “adopted,” but Ethel, Lionel and John Barrymore—his tiny niece and nephews—grew up teasing that “Uncle Googan” was the spitting image of the grandmother who raised them all in a brownstone stuffed with greasepaint ghosts. Before 1892 he slipped a ring onto Gladys Rankin’s finger—another thespian heir—and the two became the perpetual newlyweds of the variety circuit, trading quips about morning coffee and mother-in-laws. When a sketch sagged, Gladys simply rewrote it on the train to the next town. Vitagraph lured them to Flatbush in the nickelodeon boom; there Sidney directed, acted, and kept crews laughing with his mild, sideways grin. Gladys died in 1914. On the same lot a year later he married Lucille McVey, a 24-year-old writer whose energy could short-circuit a klieg light. Together they refined marital farce for the screen—he the bemused husband, she the knowing wife audiences wished lived next door. Their bright orbit cracked in 1918: only-child S. Rankin Drew, a pilot and fledgling filmmaker, was shot down over France. Sidney, hollowed out, followed his son into the dark a single year later, leaving behind a stack of comedies whose gentle mockery of wedlock still feels both affectionate and true.