Ethel Barrymore was the second of three children seemingly destined for the actor's life of their parents Maurice and Georgiana. Maurice Barrymore had emigrated from England in 1875, where after graduating from Cambridge in law had shocked his family by becoming an actor. Georgiana Drew of Philadelphia acted in her parent's stage company. The two met and married as members of Augustin Daly's company in New York.
They both acted with some of the great stage personalities of the mid Victorian theater of America and England. The Barrymore children were born and grew up in Philadelphia. And though older brother Lionel began acting early with his mother's relatives in the Drew theater company, Ethel, after a traditional girl's schooling, planned on becoming a concert pianist.
But the lure of the stage was perhaps congenital. She made her debut as a stage actress during the New York City season of 1894. Her youthful stage presence was at once a pleasure - a strikingly pretty and winsome face and large dark eyes that seemed to look out from her very soul. Her natural talent and distinctive voice only reinforced the physical presence of someone destined to command any role set before her.
After the opportunity to appear on the London stage with English great Henry Irving in The Bells (1897) and later in Peter the Great (1898), she returned to New York to star in the Clyde Fitch play Captain Jinks of the Horse Marines (1901) (produced by her friend and benefactor Charles Frohman) which brought her initial American acclaim. Lead roles, such as Nora in Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House (1905) and starring in Alice By the Fire (also 1905), Mid-Channel (1910), and Trelawney of the Wells (1911) proved her popularity as a warm and charismatic star of American stage. In the meantime married stockbroker Russell Griswold Colt in 1909 and gave birth to three children while continuing her acting career.