Drew, John (1827–62), actor, was born 3 September 1827 in Dublin, one of three sons and two daughters of Francis N. Drew, a cabinetmaker who later made pianos, and Elizabeth Drew (née Connor). The family emigrated to the US in 1837 on the SS South America and settled in Buffalo, New York. His father and a second wife had another son and later lived in Ontario, Canada. Drew's brother Frank was also a fine actor.
There is no record of Drew's formal education. According to Montrose Moses, Drew went to sea on a whaler but jumped ship to a Liverpool-bound packet ship. When he reached England, he joined a theatre company. He returned to the US, to New York, where the first record of his appearance is in the Richmond Hill Theatre in 1842, the year after the popular comic actor Tyrone Power (qv) was lost at sea en route to England. Drew's career in the New York theatre coincided with an era of national political and cultural self-confidence, when folk heroes and characters typical of the New World were celebrated on the stage. Drew made his name in a series of popular comic Irish roles, some previously identified with Power: Dr O'Toole in ‘The Irish tutor’, Meddle in ‘London assurance’ (1841) by Dion Boucicault (qv), the title role in the dramatisation of Handy Andy (1842) by Samuel Lover (qv), and O'Bryan in ‘Temptation; or The Irish emigrant’ (1856) by John Brougham (qv).
Drew married (27 July 1850) the English-born actress Louisa Lane (1820–97) at Albany, New York. Her first two husbands had both been Dublin-born actors, Henry Hunt and George Mossop. The Drews joined an acting company that included Lester Wallack, who had performed with Drew at Niblo's Garden in New York, a theatre founded by the Irish-born William Niblo (1789?–1878). It was America's preeminent entertainment centre. They toured Chicago, Buffalo, and Albany before returning to Niblo's for a six-week summer engagement. They made their permanent home in Philadelphia; Louisa Drew had made her American stage debut there in the year her husband had been born. The Drews spent their first Philadelphia season at the Chestnut Street Theatre. Then they joined the Arch Street Theatre. In 1853, when the Arch Street lease was up, John Drew and his partner William Wheatley picked up the option and opened Wheatley and Drew's Arch Street Theatre, which Drew managed from 1853 to 1855. It was there that Drew and his brother Frank made famous their interpretation of the Dromio twins in Shakespeare's ‘The comedy of errors’. Even the company members were unable to distinguish one from the other.
Drew left the Arch Street Theatre and went back on tour with his wife. He returned to Irish roles, playing Sir Lucius O'Trigger in ‘The rivals’ by Richard Brinsley Sheridan (qv), and in ‘Handy Andy’ and ‘The Irish emigrant’. Joseph Jefferson described Drew's entrance in ‘The Irish emigrant’ when Drew appeared in Richmond in 1856 under his management: ‘The door slowly opens, and upon the threshold stands a half-starved man, hunger in his gaunt form and hollow cheeks but kindness and honesty in his gentle eyes’ (315). Jefferson said that John Brougham played the hero in ‘The Irish emigrant’ but gave up the part after he saw Drew bring the role a dignity beyond the merely comic (315).
Drew toured England and Ireland in 1857, accompanied by his mother-in-law, the English actor-manager Louisa Rouse Lane. The following year he toured California, England, and Australia. As usual it was his Irish characters that drew the largest audiences. Drew returned to Philadelphia in 1862 to the Walnut Street Theatre, where Louisa had been engaged for the season. In 1860 she became manager of the Arch Street Theatre, the first woman to manage a large commercial house. Drew played his Irish roles in a long run of one hundred nights ending on 9 May 1862. He died shortly afterwards on 21 May 1862. Louisa says in her autobiography that Drew died after a short illness following his return from a business trip to New York. In other accounts he was reported to have died from a fall.
Although his career was relatively short, Joseph Jefferson considered Drew the best Irish comic actor on the American stage in his time, having ‘no equal as an Irish comedian since Tyrone Power’ (Jefferson, 316). While his Irish roles were his signature, Benjamin G. Rogers recognised that Drew's gift reached beyond light comic parts. ‘In characters of the serio-comic, inclined to the sentimental, he infused a body and depth of feeling very few comedians could equal. In the change from the comic to the pathetic, he was at his best’. Louisa Drew described her husband as a brilliant actor who could have been a great actor. ‘But too early success was his ruin; it left him nothing to do. Why should he study when he was assured on all sides (except my own) that he was as near perfection as was possible for a man to be? ‘ (Drew, 142). Easy-going, pleasant, and given to practical jokes, he was a favourite with his fellow actors and with his audience.
Drew's enduring legacy was his part in founding America's best-known acting dynasty. The Drews had three children: John, Georgiana, and Louisa. After Drew's death, his widow adopted Sidney Drew or Sidney White (b. c.1864), who was said to be the child of Drew relatives; however, her grandson Lionel Barrymore said that while Mrs Drew could say anything she wished, Sidney ‘certainly looked like her’ (35). Another child brought up in the Drew family was a daughter of Louisa Drew's half-sister, Georgina Kinloch. As a young man, John Drew had been in love with Georgina, but Louisa decided she was going to marry him instead. Drew and Kinloch toured in Australia together in 1857, and he was probably the father of her child. John Drew, jr, was an even more famous actor than his father, and his sister Georgiana married (1876) the actor Maurice Barrymore (Herbert Blythe). The three Barrymore children, Ethel, John, and Lionel were some of the best-known American actors of the first half of the twentieth century, and descendants of John Drew are still involved in theatre and film.
Otto H. Backer's drawing based on a photograph of John Drew in John Brougham's ‘The Irish emigrant’, is in the New York Public Library's theatre collection. There are two photographs, as well as illustrations of Drew in his roles as Handy Andy (Germon's photograph) and Sir Andrew Aguecheek (Johnson engraving), in his wife's Autobiographical sketch.