The Barrymores: Hollywood’s First Family

” Click here to view images from the book The Hollywood’s First Family documents the history of America’s acting dynasty in words and pictures with never-before-seen photos from the Barrymore collection. Including beautiful portraits from John and Dolores’s honeymoon, film stills, and dozens of other rare photographs, this collection is the first to fully present the glamour and the legend that is Barrymore. Spanning over six generations, two continents, and three centuries, the family of actors that would be known as the Barrymores has become an icon of the American stage and screen. From Elizabethan England to present-day Hollywood, there has never been a more talented, romantic, and complex family tree. When Herbert Blyth changed his name to Maurice Barrymore to spare his family the embarrassment of his chosen profession of acting, he unknowingly gave name to an acting tradition that would combine four respected theater the Lanes, the Blyths, the Drews, and the Costellos. These skills culminated with the births of siblings John, Ethel, and Lionel Barrymore. Beginning their careers on the stage, each moved to the silent screen and “talking pictures” with an ease that could only come from generations of talent. John, especially, became a figure of American adoration. John’s marriage to beautiful young ingénue Dolores Costello, also of an acting family, would be a Hollywood union to rival all others. The story of their first embrace during a scene of The Sea Beast — a kiss that continued long after the director called, “Cut!” — was the stuff of legend, and their honeymoon to the Galapagos Islands provided a fitting fairytale escape. But the story doesn’t stop there. Of their two children, son John Drew Barrymore (collaborator on this book) would follow in the acting tradition, and his daughter Drew Barrymore reigns today as savvy child star turned screen idol and powerful producer.