Quotes On Acting: John Barrymore: “By the time I’m visible to the audience I am Ibbetson, quite.”

John Barrymore, interviewed on acting:

An actor’s performance, at best, is the way he happens to feel about a certain character … I’m a bit of Peter Ibbetson and a bit of Jack Barrymore. At least, I never utterly forget Jack Barrymore – or things he’s thought or done – or had done to him. It’s a curious mental state. I never can understand the actors who say they lose themselves completely in a part. I don’t know what they’re talking about. Yet there’s a double identity that’s very real – to me – and somehow, never quite the same …

I’ll try to explain:

I leave my dressing room to make Peter [Ibbetson]’s first entrance. I am Jack Barrymore – Jack Barrymore smoking a cigarette. But before I make the entrance I have thrown away the cigarette and become more Ibbetson than Barrymore. By the time I’m visible to the audience I am Ibbetson, quite.

That is, you see – I hope to make this clear – on my way to the entrance I have passed imaginary flunkies and given up my hat and coat. Peter would have had a hat and coat – naturally; and would have given them up. And he’s a timid fellow. He gives up his imaginary hat and coat to these imaginary flunkies just as I, Jack Barrymore – and very timid then – once gave up my hat and coat to flunkies at a great ball given by Mary Astor.

Of course I don’t always make Peter’s entrance with the memory of a bashful boy at Mrs. Astor’s ball. That would harden the memory – make it useless. You couldn’t keep on conjuring up the same thing. You have to have different things to get the same emotion.

At times I think of my own mother (when choking Colonel Ibbetson) putting me to bed – how sweet she was. Then I can put a lot of gusto into choking the old rascal.

One time – when my brother Lionel played him – I had him get some horrible, some cheap and nasty, perfume. A whiff of that and I could feel a fine frenzy. Not that I ever actually whiffed it. But the idea of this old stinker smelling like what he really was – you understand – or maybe you don’t at all – I’m afraid I’m a bum psychologist …