John Barrymore
John Sidney Blyth Barrymore (February 15, 1882 – May 29, 1942) was an American actor of the early 20th century.
Sourced
- A person is not old until regrets take the place of dreams.
- Quoted in Gene Fowler, Good Night, Sweet Prince (1943)
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- America is the country where you buy a lifetime supply of aspirin for one dollar, and use it up in two weeks.
- Happiness sneaks through a door you didn't know that you left open.
- Sex: the thing that takes up the least amount of time and causes the most amount of trouble.
- The way to fight a woman is with your hat. Grab it and run.
About John Barrymore
- Mr. [John] Barrymore’s smile was the smile of an actor who hates actors, and who knows that he is going to kill two or three before the play is over. I am not an actor-killer, but I like my Hamlets to dislike actors, if you know what I mean, and I think you don’t.
- Robert Benchley, The New Yorker (October 17, 1936)
- The death of John Barrymore made us think again for a minute of F. Scott Fitzgerald. They were very different men: a lot alike. Undoubtedly, they both worked hard, but there was the same sense of a difficult technique easily mastered (too easily perhaps); there was the same legend of great physical magnetism, working incessantly for its own destruction; there was the same need for public confession, either desperate or sardonic; and there was always a good deal of time wasted, usually accompanied by the sweet smell of grapes. We have seen Scott Fitzgerald when everything he said was a childish parody of his own talent, and the last time we saw John Barrymore he was busy with a sick and humiliating parody of his. The similarity probably ends there. Up to the day he died, we believe, Fitzgerald still kept his original and eager devotion to his profession, along, we like to think, with the strict confidence that he might still achieve the strict perfection that was so often almost his. Barrymore, on the other hand, had given up long ago.
- Wolcott H. Gibbs, Season in the Sun (1951)