THE STAGE: That’s All There Is . . .

The leading lady was almost dumb with stage fright. On opening night in Philadelphia, her lines faded into half-heard whispers, and the audience squirmed with shared embarrassment. Then a voice rasped down from the cheap seats: “Speak up, Ethel. You Drews is all good actors.”

The advice was fine, but results were slow. In the early winter of 1901, while Captain Jinks of the Horse Marines limped toward Broadway, 21-year-old Ethel Barrymore was sick with fear. And she suffered doubly because she had been born to the stage. Her father, Maurice Barrymore, was a matinee idol. Her actress mother, Georgiana Drew Barrymore, and her uncle, John Drew, two of the topflight actors of the day, could trace their lineage back to the strolling players of Elizabethan England. Anxious not to disgrace the family, Ethel asked herself over and over again: “Why am I doing this?”

One month later, Ethel had her answer. Her rich, throaty contralto rolled over her fears, and Jinks became a hit. Long lines of ticket buyers curled across Herald Square from the box office of the Garrick Theater on Manhattan’s 35th Street. Her name went up in lights on the marquee, and for more than half a century the glow remained. Styles changed: Broadway brightened (and cheapened) from gaslight into the Great White Way, and moved north to Times Square; nickelodeons grew into movie houses; the talkies came, driving the “legit” theater into retreat, and the ghostly black-and-white flicker of TV in turn haunted the movies. But wherever actors worked at their trade, Ethel Barrymore ruled.

Wonderful Time. Her brothers, John and Lionel, also honored the family onstage. But even John, whose liquid offstage escapades lent gaudy luster to a theatrical generation, recognized amber-eyed Ethel as queen. With her, both boys were always chastened—properly formal and respectful. “My God!” exclaimed a friend after attending a typical family dinner. “Don’t you know each other?”

Tall, russet-haired, regal of bearing, Ethel spoke to all ages. Her elders admired her art; her pre-World War I contemporaries copied her manner of speech, the way she walked, even the proud tilt of her head.. She belonged not to Broadway or to Hollywood, but to the country. For Ethel Barrymore became a star in an era when no star stayed put. A few months in Manhattan were always followed by tours to other cities—and all were equally important.

Even before she became a star, Ethel was a trouper. She knew what it was to make one-night stands in Main Street theaters, to sneak out of cheap hotels with the family luggage left behind in locked, unpaid-for rooms. She knew what it was to live in hall bedrooms that cost $9 a week, meals included. “It was a wonderful time to begin seeing America,” said she, “just at the beginning of the changes that were to be so tremendous.” For her, one-night stands were always good—in Jackson, or Little Rock, or Kalamazoo (“The celery was good in Kalamazoo, and so was the audience”).

Peep Show. To Ethel Barrymore, first lady of the U.S. theater, the ’20s were ugly—”Ugly fashions, ugly manners, ugly dances like the Charleston, and ugliest of all … the self-pity of the young intellectuals, ‘the Lost Generation.’ ” But she was spared, she said. She was too busy to really notice. Most of her shows were hits —Déclassée, The Second Mrs. Tanqueray, The Constant Wife, The Kingdom of God. After 14 years, her marriage to Russell G. Colt of the firearms family had ended in divorce, and she was devoting herself to her three children and to the theater. She was 43 when she played Shakespeare’s 14-year-old heroine, Juliet.

Hollywood held small charm for her—”It looks, it feels, as if it had been invented by a Sixth Avenue peep-show man.” But movies were there to be tried, so she tried them. Perhaps the most intriguing of her films was the only one she ever made with both her brothers, Rasputin and the Empress. In 1936 she announced her retirement from the stage; scarcely a year later she was back on the boards in The Ghost of Yankee Doodle. In 1940 her portrayal of the wise, warmhearted schoolmistress in The Corn Is Green became her greatest triumph. Audiences still cheered her on to her familiar curtain-call farewell: “That’s all there is, there isn’t any more.”

For the last 18 months, Ethel Barrymore was virtually an invalid in her home in Beverly Hills, suffering from arthritis and heart disease. Her brothers had long since made their exits, John in 1942, Lionel in 1954. Still she remained the pleasantly abrupt commentator who once told an audience of Philadelphia clubwomen that they were moronic, who thought television was hell (although she had tried that, too). She remained an avid boxing and baseball fan (“I might have liked football, but I always had Saturday matinees and couldn’t get to games”). And she kept up her reading; her home bulged with books. Friends came to call—veterans of the old days on the road and admirers from the new Hollywood—and no one ever heard a word of self-pity. One evening last week she woke for a moment from a short nap, grasped her nurse’s hand and asked: “Is everybody happy? I want everybody to be happy. I know I’m happy.” Then, at 79, Ethel Barrymore died.