On October 20 of 1944, with World War II at its peak and hurtling towards its conclusion, the “zipper,” the iconic New York Times electronic headlines billboard on Times Square, briefly displayed the two tops stories among “all the news that’s fit to print.”

“MacArthur lands at Leyte Ethel Barrymore’s Temperature Lower.”

A general who promised “I shall return” had returned. But just as importantly to its readers, “the First Lady of the American Theatre,” “Queen of the Royal Family of Broadway,” was recovering from her bout of pneumonia.

That revealing moment is one of the grander take-aways in Kathleen Spaltro’s new biography of the grande dame of American acting, descended from generations of acting Drews and daughter of an actor who married into that clan and changed his name to Maurice Barrymore because he didn’t want to bring shame to his “real” family name.

Ethel Barrymore was a theatrical pop star in her youth, idolized and adored as a winsome beauty as an ingenue and flirty gamine of stage comedies by critics and audiences alike. As aspiring concert pianist in her youth who trained for and announced her intention to become an operatic prima donna in the midst of her earliest theatrical fame, Barrymore was the uncomfortable “queen” of a profession that was chosen by her footlights footsoldiers family of troupers.

As Spaltro’s academic biography details, Barrymore got stage fright the moment she became a “star.” It lasted until her dying days.

The “queen” title conferred on her in middle age was a further burden. Celebrity confined her early on, limited her ambition and the title “queen” was used as a cudgel by generations of critics who heard or heard of the plummy locutions and enunciations of her forebears in her mannerisms and speech and called her acting “old fashioned” in ways that never troubled her stage-turned-screen-actor siblings, John Barrymore and Lionel Barrymore.

Ethel had an early triumph in Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House,” a risk which critics and audiences punished the prototype “Ethel Barrymore Girl” actress for taking. Barrymore was forever frustrated that she only got a few chances to play Shakespeare — Juliet when she was too old for the role, “Merchant of Venice” and snippets of other plays for radio. The “cult of Ethel” dogged her for most of her career and limited her choices rather than broadening them.

But as Spaltro notes, Barrymore endured, “hating” the movies even as she dabbled in the silents, then found her own post-theatrical career with Oscar winning and Oscar nominated turns as she became matronly and her fame, her reputation and her imperious hauteur could be showcased to fine effect.

“Shy Empress of the Footlights” is very much an “academic biography,” with some 70 pages of notes, index and appendices stretching it to a still-thin 277 pages. The biography proper has whole pages filled with quotations from scores of reviews from publications long defunct and writers often without a byline — ardent admirers at first, comparing her to earlier legends like Eleneora Duse and Sarah Bernhardt in cascades of archaic purple prose.

That contributes to the book’s stodgy, arm’s length feel. Barrymore was very private woman who didn’t dish about an abusive marriage, famous “engagements” and courtships and her alcoholism in her evasive memoirs.

Spaltro never lets the reader forget the challenge of “knowing” someone whose greatest fame came from the ephemeral experience — for actress and audience — of the theater. “Legend” and “lore” about her and those like her will have to do.

There is more analysis of the film work — a disastrous “Rasputin” bio-pic for MGM, a lesser Hitchcock, the Oscar-winning “None but the Lonely Heart” opposite Cary Grant, the racially-charged but muzzled “Pinky” for Elia Kazan, a noir and “Portrait of Jennie” for David O. Selznick.

Barrymore gave lots of interviews early in her career, and turned more press shy later, which might explain Spaltro’s repetition of any anecdote or quip that plays like a Barrymore creed or secret to a happy life. A quip is quoted, then quoted again and then again in blocks of copy rarely broken into paragraphs. That comes off as sloppy editing or “padding” a thin manuscript.

The chronology of the life and career of “First Lady of the American Theatre” is jumbled up so much that one loses track of which “Jack” (John Barrymore or “Uncle Jack” Drew — the writer is talking about. Names are dropped by the bushel basketful and unless you know your Woollcotts and Dorothy Parkers from your “Thomas Hishak,” you’ll wear out Wikipedia trying to supplement all the author left out which her editors did not attempt to clarify.

Spaltro indulges herself in long sidebars about stage and screen depictions of disability in Barrymore’s day, and ever so daintily refers to Barrymore’s struggles with the bottle as “misuse of alcohol” and “alcohol misuse.” That’s not just dainty, it’s precious.

The research is thorough enough, and the conclusions reached are defensible. It’s their organization and presentation that lack a good editor’s touch. Still, something like a portrait emerges, of a caustic wit and an increasingly haughty doyenne of the theatre who came to “hate” New York critics and New York audiences.

“I never let them cough,” she famously cracked. “They wouldn’t dare.”

You dare not explain away the excesses of theatre-turned-film tyro Orson Welles with “he’s young” to Ethel Barrymore.

“But he’s been so young so long.”

In later life, the woman could stare down directors, negotiate from “imagined” strength with producers, tell off critics and abuse reporters and also hold her own with Groucho, as this sketch demonstrates.

It isn’t just through her grand-niece Drew Barrymore that we remember Ethel. Theatre buffs know the names of the Lunts and Fontannes, the Katharine Cornells or Mary Martins, other “Kings” and “Queens” of Broadway.” But the Barrymores’ legacy still has a heartbeat thanks to the level of fame and acclaim. And the Barrymore way of acting and speaking lives on in classic films.

As much as she hated “Hollywood” and telling stories out of sequence in movies, multiple takes and all that, that has proven to be Ethel’s real immortality, that and a theatre on the Broadway that she claimed to disdain but which celebrated her at every opportunity — especially in her youth and finally coming back around for her Victory Lap dotage.

“Ethel Barrymore: Shy Empress of the Footlights,” by Kathleen Spaltro. University Press of Kentucky, 277 pages including extensive index and notes. $40.