Taken on September 23, 1922 Lionel went aboard the S.S. George Washington in New York City bound for Europe where he spent several weeks.

steamboatbilljr:

The night that John Barrymore—who bore a lifelong resistance to the family trade—made his debut as a star in The Fortune Hunter in 1909, he spoke with his brother Lionel.

“Well, Jake,” Lionel said, “it looks like you are hooked for good.”

“What in the hell happened?” Jack asked. “Who am I?”

“It usually takes me two nights,” Lionel replied, “to find out what happened on the first. You’ll live.”

“But I’m scared stiff,” Jack said. “Why didn’t I give a stinking performance?”

“Because,” said Lionel, “you couldn’t.”

orsons:

Lionel Barrymore, ca. 1925

orsons:

This is the age of insincerity. The movies had the misfortune to come along in the twentieth century, and because they appeal to the masses there can be no sincerity in them. Hollywood is tied hand and foot to the demands for artificiality of the masses all over the world.

Lionel Barrymore admires Agnes Moorehead’s suit that she wears for a broadcast of The Mayor of the Town, 1940’s

Portrait of Lionel, Ethel, and John Barrymore for Rasputin and the Empress, 1932

‘As I looked at them through the camera’, wrote Clarence Bull in 1968, ‘I got the shock of my life. They all looked alike. All looked alike no matter how I posed them.  The bond between them was both amazing and frightening.’

sourvix:

Lionel Barrymore and Joan Crawford, Grand Hotel — 1932

I can remember when nobody believed an actor and didn’t care what he believed. Why, the fact that he was an actor made everything he said open to question, because acting was thought to be a vocation embraced exclusively by scatter-brains, wastrels and scamps.

— Lionel Barrymore