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:

Other 8 August Anniversaries

Filmmakers

• Robert Siodmak (1900-1973): Director of many films including Son of Dracula and The Killers.
• Dino De Laurentiis (1919-2010): Producer of scores of films but usually big-budget ones at the end of his career like King Kong and Ragtime.
• Esther Williams (1921-2013): Actor known for her aquamusicals like Bathing Beauty.
• Rory Calhoun (1922-1999): Actor known mostly for westerns but I love him for Motel Hell.
• Richard Anderson (1926-2017): Actor best known for the Director of the OSI on The Six Million Dollar Man and The Bionic Woman, he was also the villain in The Night Strangler.
• Nita Talbot (1930-): The Russian spy Marya on Hogan’s Heroes but she was also in some interesting films like Puppet Master 2.
• Dustin Hoffman (1937-): Actor known for Marathon Man, Ishtar, and more.
• Martin Brest (1951-): Director of Beverly Hills Cop and Midnight Run.

Films

• Hold That Ghost (1941): The first of the Abbott and Costello “horror” films.
• Caltiki, the Immortal Monster (1959): Archaeologists unleash a Mayan blob monster.
• Frankenstein vs Baragon (1965): Scientists create a creature by radiating Frankenstein’s heart.
• Macon County Line (1974): A local cop targets two outsiders who are innocent. A psychotronic classic!
• Contraband (1980): Cigarette smugglers go to war.
• The Fiendish Plot of Dr Fu Manchu (1980): Peter Sellers’ last film.
• A Cat in the Brain (1990): A horror director is stalked by a serial killer.
• Body Bags (1993): John Carpenter’s excellent horror anthology but the best segment is directed by Tobe Hooper. Must see!
• My Wife and My Dead Wife (2007): A man in an unhappy marriage moves the family into an old house where he falls in love with a ghost.

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Sylvia Sidney publicity photo via Wikimedia. It is in the public domain.