HARD-WORKING ACTOR

Southland Times, Issue 23389, 22 December 1937, Page 8

HARD-WORKING ACTOR

LIONEL BARRYMORE’S GOOD RECORD

SALTY PART IN “CAPTAINS COURAGEOUS”

Lionel Barrymore is one of the few people in Hollywood who does not pretend to know anything about the films: he has been making them only for the past 20 years. And if he was not in England now, making “A Yank at Oxford” with a young man called Robert Taylor, who was mobbed-by crowds of English women on his arrival, he would be somewhere else making a picture, for making pictures is something the hardest-working of the Barrymores is doing all the time. Incredible as it sounds, he has made three since the recent “Captains Courageous,” in which he played a Gloucester fisherman with incomparable saltiness (he dashed off “Camille” in his spare time between a number of other takes; it was a relatively brief part, though a memorable one, as are most of the Barrymore roles after he has done with them). “Saratoga,” “Navy Blue and Gold” and the Oxford story, on which he is at present completing the English sequences, bring Mr Barrymore up to date. x It is not surprising to find that the same qualities of honest and careful workmanship which (distinguish Mr Barrymore’s acting enter into his chief recreation: etching. Painstakingly wrought scenes along the Pacific Coast, small shipping in small harbours, seafaring characters with weather-beaten faces mending boats,, hauling in nets, or engaging in other waterside activities are his favourite subjects; the gull, apparently, is his favourite bird. Mr Barrymore is clearly a lover of the sea, and played that Gloucester skipper brilliantly by rights, yet all those shots he figured in were taken in the Metro studio, and this crossing to England is his first ocean voyage in fourteen years. And the only reason he was going over—was to make a picture!