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Drew Barrymore's dad dies
30/11/2004 11:03 - (SA)
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| John D Barrymore is shown in a scene from Rawhide in this 1964 photo. (AP File) |
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Los Angeles - John Drew Barrymore, the troubled heir to an acting dynasty and the father of movie star Drew Barrymore, died on Monday. He was 72.
"He was a cool cat. Please smile when you think of him," Drew Barrymore said in a statement issued by the office of Chris Miller, publicist for the actress and her production company, Flower Films.
No information was released about the cause of death or where in Los Angeles he died.
John D Barrymore was part of an acting clan that included his father, the famed stage and early film actor John Barrymore, and his father's siblings, Lionel Barrymore and Ethel Barrymore. Drew Barrymore is his daughter by his third wife, Ildiko Jaid Barrymore.
He was born in Beverly Hills on June 4, 1932. His mother was actress Dolores Costello.
He started his career as a teenager, appearing professionally first as John Barrymore Jun and then as John Drew Barrymore.
His early roles in the 1950s included the movies The Sundowners, High Lonesome, Quebec, The Big Night, Thunderbirds and While the City Sleeps.
But along the way there were problems with drugs, drunken driving and violence, domestic and otherwise. By the early 1960s he had left Hollywood for Italy, working in European movies.
Troubled past
In a 1962 interview with The Associated Press in Rome he made no apologies for headline-grabbing street brawls there.
"I'm not a nice, clean-cut American kid at all," he said. "I'm just a human being. Those things just happen."
By 1964 he had been married twice, to Cara Williams and to Italian actress Gabriella Palazollo, and had returned to Hollywood after making more than a dozen films overseas - none of them any good by his own estimation.
By then his billing had become John Drew Barrymore, perhaps to step out of his father's shadow.
"I don't mind if my acting is compared to him," he said in an AP interview. "The trouble is that people expect me to live like him."
Trouble still followed.
In 1967, a San Bernardino County jury convicted him of possession of drug paraphernalia - cigarette papers - and acquitted him of being in a place where marijuana was being smoked. The judge rejected the prosecution's request to sentence him to 60 days in jail, and instead put him on probation.
"Take advantage of your talent and I think you'll go far," Municipal Judge Theodore G Krumm told him.
After another retreat from Hollywood, he had sporadic film and television roles.
As a teenage star battling alcoholism herself, Drew Barrymore wrote about her father in the memoir Little Girl Lost. He was depicted as menacing, showing up only to abuse his daughter and former wife and ask for money.
John D Barrymore is also survived by a son, John Barrymore III, by his first wife.
- AP
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