Diana Barrymore

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Diana Barrymore (born March 3, 1921 in New York City , † January 25, 1960 there ) was an American actress .

Diana Barrymore was the daughter of Hollywood legend John Barrymore and the poet Blanche Oelrichs (aka Michael Strange). She was the half-sister of John Drew Barrymore and thus the aunt of the actress Drew Barrymore , she was also the niece of the Hollywood legends Lionel Barrymore , Ethel Barrymore and Harry Davenport . At the age of six she went to boarding school in Paris . She rarely saw her parents because they separated and her father lived with his third wife, Dolores Costello . In 1937 she was accepted at the American Academy of Dramatic Art in New York. The producer David O. Selznick invited her the following year to audition for Gone With the Wind . However, she did not get the role. In the following years she played theater. Here she played her way up from small stages to Broadway .

She made her film debut in 1941 in the film Hearts in Flames by Raoul Walsh . In the following years she made a few more films until her career fizzled out in the mid-1940s. After the death of her father in 1942, with whom she was never reconciled, she married the actor Bramwell Fletcher . In 1947, after the divorce, she married tennis professional John Howard a second time . However, he was imprisoned for slavery in 1950 . Her film career came to an end as quickly as it began. She started a new career in television . At CBS she got her own talk show, The Diana Barrymore Show , which was soon canceled. Because of the stagnation of her film career and the scandal surrounding her husband Howard, she had been drinking problems for a long time. This led to both financial problems and conflicts with the police.

In 1960 Diana Barrymore died of severe burns. To this day there are rumors that she committed suicide. Her autobiography was published in 1957 under the title Too Much, Too Soon - Too much, too fast , just one year later she was with Errol Flynn filmed as John Barrymore.

Filmography (selection)

Web links