page_title: Ethel Barrymore
section_title: Early life
hierarchical_section_title: Ethel Barrymore / Early life
caption_attribution_description: English: Ethel Barrymore, three-quarter length portrait, seated, facing front. Taken in 1901, for Captain Jinks of the Horse Marines
context_page_description: Ethel Barrymore was an American actress and a member of the Barrymore family of actors. Barrymore was a stage, screen and radio actress whose career spanned six decades, and was regarded as "The First Lady of the American Theatre".
context_section_description: Barrymore was born Ethel Mae Blythe in Philadelphia, the second child of the actors Maurice Barrymore (whose real name was Herbert Blythe) and Georgiana Drew. Her father was nearly killed four months before her birth in a famous Old West encounter in Texas while heading a traveling road company. She was named for her father's favorite character—Ethel in William Makepeace Thackeray's The Newcomes.
  She was the sister of actors John and Lionel Barrymore, the aunt of actor John Drew Barrymore, and great-aunt of actress Drew Barrymore. She was also a granddaughter of actress and theater-manager Louisa Lane Drew (Mrs. John Drew), and niece of Broadway matinée idol John Drew Jr and early Vitagraph Studios stage and screen star Sidney Drew.
  She spent her childhood in Philadelphia and attended Roman Catholic schools there.
  In 1884, the family sailed to England and stayed two years. Maurice had inherited a substantial amount of money from an aunt and decided to exhibit a play and star in some plays at London's Haymarket Theatre. Ethel recalled being frightened on first meeting Oscar Wilde when handing him some cakes and later being reprimanded by her parents for showing fear of Wilde. Returning to the U.S. in 1886, her father took her to her first baseball game. She established a lifelong love of baseball and wanted to be a concert pianist. The years in England were the happiest of her childhood years due to the fact the Barrymores were more of a nuclear family in London than in the United States.
caption: Barrymore in 1901 in one of the costumes from Captain Jinks of the Horse Marines
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