In 1958, less than two years before his own death, Errol returned to Warner Brothers to play his idol and role-model John Barrymore (who died in 1942 of alcoholism) in this adaptation of daughter Diana Barrymore's miserable tale of growing up as a child of two famous celebrities, John and seriously repressed poet Michael Strange.
I'll keep this short. Errol's portrayal of John Barrymore was closer to the heart than perhaps he ever imagined. Typecast doesn't even start to describe it. Dorothy Malone struggled hard to portray the complexity of Diana Barrymore - even harder to do within the limits of 1950s film norms. Sad on a couple of levels. Like Diana Barrymore,an actress. Even more sadly, and perhaps prophetically, the happy ending of Too Much Too Soon (Diana, out of rehab, clean and sober) was premature. Unfortunately, she died of an overdose of alcohol and sleeping pills in 1960, two years after the film was released. Sad.
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