FILMDOM.

Waimate Daily Advertiser, Volume XXI, 12 January 1922, Page 2

FILMDOM.

MR BARRYMORE AT SCOTLAND YARD. To-day children with the nose of a wellbred sleuth-hound and decently nurtured instincts will be stealthily following the spoor of a taxicab from an hotel in Piccadilly (called the Ritz) to an ominous building off Whitehall (called Scotland Yard). There they will transmogrify themselves into sub-in-spectors, stride nonchalantly in, and find—who but Sherlock Holmes himself?

So John Barrymore tells me. Only, as film-producers always change mind between their morning cup of coffee and their after-breakfast liquer, don’t set Scotland Yard on me if the great man is invisible.

The fact is that John Barrymore is over here “doing” Sherlock Holmes for the films. John Barrymore is, ot course, the famous brother of the famous Ethel and the famous Lionel Barrymore, whose three names angrily flash in glaring headlines at each other across the rival theatres of New York.

“On Tuesday,” he told me, as he sat in flowered pyjamas in his room in the Ritz, “we astonished the natives of St. John’s College, Cambridge. On Thursday the great detective collected local color from Windsor Castle. Today I guess I’ll have to transmute myself into a trained sea-lion to beard that den of flat-footed Daniels. I don’t like it.”

“And my dear Watson?” 1 asked. Sherlock Barrymore was momentarily nonplussed. “You won’t believe me, and you won’t tell Sir Arthur, I hope—but we’ve clean forgotten all about poor Watson. But say, that’s some part. A sort of a cross between a sophisticated Boswell and a telephone receiver. ’ ’

The strange thing about these Barrymores is that though their father and mother (Maurice Barrymore and George Drew) were very great actors indeed, and though their grandparents and their greut-grandparents were great actors, all three children went in search of strange gods. “Ethel’s theory,” John Barrymore told me, “was that she should be a pianist. Lionel threw the stage over for six years to study art. I was at the Slade School in London before I ever acted at all.” He did not add that when ultimately forced on the stage by a eern parent he purposely donned' a false walrus moustache in imitation of that parent —bringing down the curtain in confusion. Nor did he add that when forced on the stage by his sister Ethel, he invented a series of impromptu and so utterly irrelevant remarks that again the curtain fell—while he took the call.

Yet when he finally succumbed to the stage his success was colossal, first as a comedian, then as a serious actor. “His Richard III.,” wrote an American critic, “is one of the great unforgettable performances of our time.” His managers in 1910 actually insured him for £lO,OOO against h:s marrying for twelve mouths. Within four he was safely married.

I attacked him yesterday on the old England v. America controvery, and though too old a hand to be drawn, his replies were interesting. “Du Maurier I think incomparable, and I imagine no finer performance than that of Meggie Albanesi in ‘A Bill of Divorcement.’ I have only one quarrel. As soon ns your actors have soaked their personality in one part, they don’t save it, as they should, by immediately acting a completely divergent part. They sink into a rut.” To look at, Barrymore has still the “matinee idol” face, with that odd whistling expression that all actors develop, as though in a permanent state of repressed emotion. Last year he married Mrs Blanche Oelrichs Thomas —the most beautiful woman in America, according to Hellion, the French etcher; also an acknowledged leader of New York society, and a writer (under the name of Michael Strange) of such eminent merit that she is actually allowed to enter the Opera in New York in ink-stained corduroys. “On Saturday,” he told me, as I was leaving, “I cross to America and my six-months-old little girl. Meanwhile I guess I’ll ask you not to publish that pre-war photograph of mine with the matinee curl which I see your newspapers disinter periodically. I’d rather look human than young.”