Nice vintage 5x7-inch black and white portrait, boldly signed in black fountain pen in the 1930s. In good condition for its age, with some notes by a previous owner along the bottom border. Lionel Barrymore, a leading character actor and occasional director of the silent era through Golden Age, starred in a number of horror, sci-fi and fantasy films, portraying the manipulative psychic in The Master Mind (1920), a walking corpse in Vendetta (1922), Mathias in The Bells (1926), Professor Leroy in The Thirteenth Hour (1927), Count Dakkar in The Mysterious Island (1929), "Gramps" Northrup in On Borrowed Time (1939), and the cruel, wheelchair-bound bank mogul Mr. Potter in It's a Wonderful Life (1946). During his celebrated collaboration with filmmaker Tod Browning, he starred as the amorous Greek in The Show (1927), Crane in the Lon Chaney classic West of Zanzibar (1928), Professor Zellen in Mark of the Vampire (1935) with Bela Lugosi, and the cross-dressing miniature-maker Paul Lavond in The Devil-Doll (1936). As a director, he is remembered for The Unholy Night in 1929.

• Tweet