Biographie

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.

He and his sister Ethel Barrymore were the first Oscar-winning brother and sister in acting categories.

Great uncle of Drew Barrymore.

Acted from wheelchair from 1938 due to the effects of arthritis and hip injury.

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.

I've got a lot of ham in me.

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.

[1943 comment on Margaret O'Brien] If that child had been born in the middle ages, she'd have been burned as a witch.

You can't retire in Hollywood. Nobody gives up a job, even if he's ninety, or sick, or has money like Midas. Everybody works until his last breath, and when one day they die, they die like Napoleon/s grenadiers, who died with the words "Vive l'Empereur!" Just so, the last words of a director or producer are "Make another take!"