Barrymore was born in Beverly Hills on June 4, 1932 into an acting clan that included his father, the famed stage and early film actor John Barrymore, and his father's siblings, Lionel and Ethel Barrymore. His mother was actor Dolores Costello. Drew Barrymore is his daughter by his third wife, Ildiko Jaid Barrymore.

He started his career as a teenager; early roles in the 1950s included the movies The Sundowners, High Lonesome and While the City Sleeps. But along the way there were problems with drugs, drunken driving and violence, domestic and otherwise. By the early 1960s he had left Hollywood for Italy, working in European movies.

After two marriages and more than a dozen films overseas - none of them good, by his own estimation - he returned to Hollywood. In 1967, a San Bernardino County jury convicted him of possession of drug paraphernalia and he was put on probation. After another retreat from Hollywood, he had sporadic film and television roles.

As a teenage star battling alcoholism herself, Drew Barrymore wrote about her father in the memoir Little Girl Lost. He was depicted as menacing, showing up only to abuse his daughter and former wife and ask for money.

John Drew Barrymore is also survived by a son, John Barrymore III, by his first wife.