Mental Breakdown and Death
The March 25, 1905, the New York Times reported: "He was playing a vaudeville engagement at a Harlem theatre when he suddenly dropped his lines and began to rave, (to the horror of his son John). The following day he became violent and was taken to Bellevue insane ward by John. No easy task as John had to lure his father away at the pretense of starring in a new play. At Bellevue and later Amityville he was diagnosed with the lingering effects of syphilis, an incurable disease in his day. Nothing could be done for him. During his stay at Bellevue he nearly strangled his daughter Ethel when she paid a visit to him. Ethel, through her early success on the stage, would pick up the tab for her father's stay in the institutions. A trained boxer, Barrymore's strength remained as in a scuffle with one of the Bellevue attendants, he picked the man up over his head and threw him into a corner. He died at Amityville in his sleep, and Ethel had him buried at Glenwood Cemetery in Philadelphia. Barrymore had lived long enough to see all three of his children grow to adulthood and enter the family business of acting. There are no photographs that survive of Barrymore taken with any of his three children.
Read more about this topic: Maurice Barrymore
Famous quotes containing the words mental, breakdown and/or death:
“One who shows signs of mental aberration is, inevitably, perhaps, but cruelly, shut off from familiar, thoughtless intercourse, partly excommunicated; his isolation is unwittingly proclaimed to him on every countenance by curiosity, indifference, aversion, or pity, and in so far as he is human enough to need free and equal communication and feel the lack of it, he suffers pain and loss of a kind and degree which others can only faintly imagine, and for the most part ignore.”
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