[5] Barrymore was born John Sidney Blyth in the Philadelphia home of his maternal grandmother Louisa Lane Drew and was known by family, friends and colleagues as "Jack".

One punishment that he received there was being made to read a copy of Dante's Inferno; he later recounted that, as he looked at the illustrations by Gustave Doré, "my interest was aroused, and a new urge was born within me.

After a year of formal study, he left and "devoted much of his subsequent stay in London to bohemianism and nocturnal adventures", according to family biographer Margot Peters.

In March, his father had a mental breakdown as a result of tertiary syphilis, and Barrymore, after a discussion with Ethel and gaining a court petition, took him to Bellevue Hospital.

[42] The same year, Barrymore began an affair with a beautiful artists' model, "Florodora girl" and aspiring actress named Evelyn Nesbit, who was a mistress of architect Stanford White.

[52] During the play's run and subsequent tour across the US, Collier became a mentor to the young actor, although his patience was continually tested by Barrymore's drinking, which led to occasional missed performances, drunken stage appearances, and general misbehavior.

[65][66] The critic for The New York Times thought the play was, "acted with fine comedy spirit by John Barrymore ... [who] gave indisputable signs last night of grown and growing powers.

[93] Around this time, Barrymore began a relationship with a married mother of two, Blanche Oelrichs, a suffragist from an elite Rhode Island family with what Peters calls "anarchistic self-confidence".

[95] Both Oelrichs and Sheldon urged Barrymore to take on his next role, Fedya Vasilyevich Protasov, in Leo Tolstoy's play Redemption at the Plymouth Theatre.

Conscious of the criticism of his vocal range, he underwent training with Margaret Carrington, the voice and diction trainer, to ensure he sounded right for the part, and the pair worked together daily for up to six hours a day for six weeks.

In October, Oelrichs returned to New York and Barrymore traveled to London to film the exterior scenes for his latest movie, Sherlock Holmes, in which he played the title role.

[133] Among the audience members was the 20-year-old actor John Gielgud, who wrote in his program "Barrymore is romantic in appearance and naturally gifted with grace, looks and a capacity to wear period clothes, which makes his brilliantly intellectual performance classical without being unduly severe, and he has tenderness, remoteness, and neurosis all placed with great delicacy and used with immense effectiveness and admirable judgment".

"[135] At the end of this run of Hamlet, Barrymore traveled to Paris, where Oelrichs had stayed during his residence in London, but the reunion was not a happy one and the couple argued frequently.

When he returned to America, she remained in Paris,[136] and the couple drew up a separation agreement that provided Oelrichs with $18,000 a year and stated that neither could sue for divorce on the grounds of adultery.

This was one of the biggest money-makers of the year for Warner Bros.[141] Although Barrymore wanted Astor to play the female lead, she was unavailable, and Dolores Costello was cast in her place.

Critic and essayist Stark Young wrote in The New Republic that Barrymore's films were "rotten, vulgar, empty, in bad taste, dishonest, noisome with a silly and unwholesome exhibitionism, and odious with a kind of stale and degenerate studio adolescence.

[148] In 1927, Barrymore planned to revive Hamlet at the Hollywood Bowl, but in August he canceled the production, without explanation, and began filming the third of the UA pictures, Eternal Love, for which he was paid $150,000.

[149] Barrymore purchased and converted an estate in the Hollywood Hills into 16 different buildings with 55 rooms, gardens, skeet ranges, swimming pools, fountains and a totem pole.

Martin Dickstein, the critic for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, wrote that Barrymore "registers a personal triumph in the role", calling his performance "brilliant ... one of the best of his movie career".

"[158] The same year, Barrymore starred as jewel thief Baron Felix von Geigern together with Greta Garbo in the 1932 film Grand Hotel, in which Lionel also appeared.

[162] In 1932, Barrymore went to RKO Pictures where he played a borderline-alcoholic lawyer in State's Attorney, and an escaped lunatic in A Bill of Divorcement, opposite Katharine Hepburn in her screen debut.

[174] Barrymore's relationship with Costello was deeply troubled and, believing she was going to declare him mentally incompetent, he left their home in Los Angeles and traveled first to London and then to India.

A newspaper editor chartered a plane and flew Barrie to Chicago, to meet Barrymore's train; she broadcast a plea for him to return, and her pursuit became national news.

The couple had a heated argument in public shortly afterward, and he again spent time in Kelley's Rest Home and hospital, which cost him an average of $800 daily, draining his finances.

The New York Times commented that "Shakespeare's lines uttered dramatically by the voice of John Barrymore sweep through the 'ether' with a sound of finality; it seems that they are his words and no one else could speak them with such lifelike force".

The New York Times thought the film was "one of the liveliest, gayest, wittiest and naughtiest comedies of a long hard season" and that Barrymore, "the [Lou] Gehrig of eye-brow batting, rolls his phrases with his usual richly humorous effect".

The New York Times wrote that "As a play it is a feeble thing, hardly matching the spectacular public accounts of his amours ... for all of Mr. Barrymore's shenanigans and devastating wit, The Great Profile is more than a little pathetic.

[201] Worse was to come in his final film, Playmates (1941), which "amply illustrated the depths to which he had fallen; he played an alcoholic Shakespearean ham named John Barrymore".

[226] Three years later, a London production, Jack: A Night on the Town with John Barrymore, ran for 60 performances at the Criterion Theatre, and Williamson again played the lead.

Howard Thompson, the film critic of The New York Times, wrote that "Flynn, as the late John Barrymore, a moody, wild-drinking ruin of a great actor, steals the picture, lock, stock and keg.