Lionel Barrymore

Trivia

• He was buried a Roman Catholic next to his second wife and his brother, John Barrymore, in Calvary Cemetery, Hollywood.
• He played Scrooge in "A Christmas Carol" on the radio annually.
• The three Barrymore siblings appeared in only one film together: Rasputin and the Empress (1932). Lionel and John appeared without Ethel in Arsène Lupin (1932), Grand Hotel (1932), Night Flight (1933) and Dinner at Eight (1933). A decade after John's demise, Lionel and Ethel appeared in Main Street to Broadway (1953), Lionel's last film.
• Screen, stage, radio, vaudeville actor, film producer, and screenwriter.
• Acted from wheelchair from 1938 due to the effects of arthritis and hip injury.
• Interred at Calvary Cemetery, Los Angeles, California, USA, in the Main Mausoleum, Block 352.
• Portrayed Dr. Gillespie on the syndicated radio show "The Story of Dr. Kildare" (1950-1951).
• His name appeared in the Looney Toons Cartoon One Froggy Evening (1955) (directed by Chuck Jones) in a newspaper on a park bench before the distraught man was sent to a psychiatric ward because the frog would not sing in front of anyone else.
• Invented the boom microphone.
• He was one of the very few screen actors in the 1930s, 1940s and early 1950s who had a prolific career despite being in a wheelchair. From 1938, his screen roles were written to accommodate his disability.

Quotes

• "If that child had been born in the middle ages, she'd have been burned as a witch."
• "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. I don't believed that's true today and I don't think that it ever was."
• "I've got a lot of ham in me."
• "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."