Diana Barrymore

At 38 years old, Diana Barrymore has this physical status:

Diana Blanche Barrymore Blythe (March 3, 1921 – January 25, 1960), known professionally as Diana Barrymore, was an American film and stage actress.

Early life

Born Diana Blanche Barrymore Blythe in New York, New York, Diana Barrymore was the daughter of actor John Barrymore and his second wife, poet Blanche Oelrichs.

Her parents divorced when she was four years old. Educated in Paris and New York City, Barrymore had little contact with her father.

Personal life and death

Barrymore was married three times in eight years. Her first was to actor Bramwell Fletcher, who was 17 years her senior and had appeared with her father in his 1931 classic Svengali. Then she married John Howard, a tennis player. Her last marriage was to actor Robert Wilcox. The marriage to Wilcox ended in June 1955 when he died of a heart attack at the age of 45, while traveling by train.

Barrymore died on January 25, 1960, and she is interred in the Woodlawn Cemetery in The Bronx, New York, next to her mother. Her death has been attributed to a drug overdose, but her autopsy failed to find a cause of death and found no indication of overdose.

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Career

Barrymore loved acting and enrolled at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts while in her teens. She began her step into theatre with a 1939 cover of Life, reflecting the fame of the Barrymore name in the world of theatre. Barrymore made her Broadway debut at the age of 19 and made her first appearance in films with a small part in a Warner Bros. production the next year. She signed a major advertising campaign naming her as "1942's Most Sensational New Screen Personality" in 1942. However, alcohol and opioid problems were soon apparent, and negative media coverage dampened her prospects. Barrymore's personal struggles ended her career after less than three years in Hollywood and six major film appearances at Universal.

After years of alcoholism, her father, John, died in 1942 from cirrhosis of the liver. Diana Barrymore's life became a series of alcohol- and opioid-related suicides marked by bouts of severe anxiety that culminated in numerous suicide attempts and extended sanitarium stays. Diana wasted her film earnings and inheritance from her father's estate, and when her mother died in 1950, she was left with virtually nothing from a once-vast family fortune. In 1949, she was offered her own television talk show titled The Diana Barrymore Show. The show was supposed to be broadcast, but Barrymore didn't turn up and the whole service was cancelled straight away. It would have been the first talk show in television history if she had participated in the program, predating Joe Franklin by two years. She and her third husband toured Australia in the 1950s, but upon returning to the United States, she expressed her dissatisfaction with the continent.

In 1955, Barrymore, after three unsuccessful marriages to opioid and often abusive husbands, was hospitalized for almost a year of therapy. Too Much, Too Soon, she released her autobiography, Too Much, Too Soon, in 1957, with the help and support of ghostwriter Gerold Frank, which also included Spurgeon Tucker's portrait. She promoted the book in July 1957 by appearing on Mike Wallace's television show The Mike Wallace Interview. “I don't drink alcohol at the moment,” she wrote, which is also available online. I hope to be able to drink like a human being one day [or] in the very distant future. That may not be possible."

Dorothy Malone appeared in Too Much, Too Soon in the United States the following year, and Warner Bros. portrayed her father as Barrymore and Errol Flynn as her father. With critics or moviegoers, the film was not a hit.

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