The world was a brighter place on 8 August 1910 because that was the day Sylvia Sidney was born.
I know her primarily from two films she made at the end of her life. The first was Beetlejuice. She played the Maitlands’ caseworker, Juno. You will remember her as smoking with the smoke coming out of her cut throat. Sadly, she was a lifelong smoker who eventually died from it — although at the ripe age of 88.
I also knew of Sylvia Sidney from Mars Attacks! In it, she plays Lukas Haas’ sweet grandmother, Florence Norris, who appears to have dementia but is actually spry and insightful. The two of them are the heroes of the film. It is a totally different role from Juno.
But these films capped an incredible career for Sidney. In addition to her numerous film and TV roles, she did a lot of stage work. The Internet Broadway Database (which is incomplete) lists 16 plays she was in from 1927 through 1977. She worked primarily on stage during the 1920s. She was under contract with Paramount Pictures for the first half of the 1930s.
In 1935, Paramount loaned her to Walter Wanger for a crime drama, Mary Burns, Fugitive. She liked the experience and independence. So when her contract was up, she left.
Both with Paramount and without, Sylvia Sidney did very well. She made William Wyler’s Dead End with Joel McCrea and Humphrey Bogart; Fritz Lang’s Fury with Spencer Tracy and You Only Live Once with Henry Fonda (she was in one other Lang film); Marion Gering’s films Madame Butterfly and Thirty-Day Princess, both with Cary Grant; City Streets with Gary Cooper; and Dorothy Arzner’s Merrily We Go to Hell with Fredric March. She was also in the excellent Hitchcock film, Sabotage. Sidney got top billing in almost all of these films.
She got an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress in Summer Wishes, Winter Dreams. In it, she plays a similar role to the one she later did in Beetlejuice. She’s wonderful with Joanne Woodward. But she lost to 10-year-old Tatum O’Neal, who was amazing in all those long single-shots Peter Bogdanovich used.
You can find pretty much all of these films for free online, and I recommend doing so. But since I find her so adorable in Mars Attacks! I’m going to embed it here:
Sylvia Sidney publicity photo via Wikimedia. It is in the public domain.
Ha — that “other” movie with Fritz Lang, “You and Me,” is pretty good! I mean, actually, no, it’s a mess, but it’s an entertaining one. (Not unlike “Mars Attacks,” in that regard, although a completely different genre.)
https://librarydvdlove.substack.com/p/you-and-me
I’ve gotta watch more movies with her in it — she’s great!
I watched the Hitchcock one and it was good. I’m shocked that she was such a big star without my noticing it. I would like to see more of her work.
I guess she was “difficult,” per Hollywood. One link that Wiki cites has this quote (https://www.the-independent.com/arts-entertainment/obituary-sylvia-sidney-1107697.html)
“I was inclined to be impatient with some of the trimmings surrounding stardom. I liked my independence and wanted to live my own life and not be at the mercy of fan magazines, columnists and studio press agents. I was discontented with the shoddiness of some of my movies.”
What a total bitch! Crtiticize Hollywood for being shoddy? You must be a crazy DIFFICULT person!
I watched a half hour interview with her toward the end of her life. She definitely had that Bette Davis thing going on. She was asked what her favorite roles were and she said (more or less), “I didn’t have roles! Roles are like Lady Macbeth. I played parts.” As my sister would say, she was a kick in the pants!
That is exactly what I have been thinking. It’s amazing. And Sabotage is quite good. I was truly surprised that the kid died. I wasn’t expecting that!