Saturdays with the Stars: Sylvia Sidney

Each month of 2021 we will be taking a look at the leading ladies of some of Alfred Hitchcock's many celebrated classics; we'll be doing this series chronologically to when they first entered Hitchcock's filmography.  Last month, we did a double dip of Hitchcock films with the icy blonde beauty Madeleine Carroll.  This month, we'll turn our attention stateside to an actress whose career wasn't jump-started by Hitchcock at all, but in fact he simply hired her when she was at the peak of her fame, an actress whose stardom would ebb-and-flow in the decades to come but would become known to modern audiences for a part she'd do when she was nearly eighty-years-old.  This month, our star is Sylvia Sidney.

Sidney was born in the Bronx, the daughter of Jewish immigrants.  She started acting in the New York theater scene in her teen years, eventually being discovered by a Hollywood talent scout and eventually being signed to a contract with Paramount, filling the gap at the studio left by Clara Bow (even though the actresses' onscreen personas had little in common).  Sidney's sad eyes and penchant for picking girlfriend roles in big hits made her one of the best-paid actresses in Hollywood, and put her in 1930's classics like Fury and The Trail of the Lonesome Pine.

It was during this time that Sidney did her one film with Alfred Hitchcock, 1936's Sabotage, where she played opposite John Loder.  Unlike some of the later women who worked with Hitchcock, Sidney seemed to like him.  The actress who is...cantankerous (that's probably the kindest way to put it), didn't mince words about anyone she used to work with, but she stated that she "adored" Hitchcock in an interview she did late in her career, though she did say that the director treated her like she was an idiot (which, while there's a lot of things you can say about Sidney offscreen, that would not be the case).

Sidney's career waned as the 1930's went on, eventually pushing her to long breaks in filmmaking, and like many actresses of her generation she went on to do a lot of television work in the 1950s.  However, Sidney had multiple acts in her career, eventually scoring an Oscar nomination for 1973's Summer Wishes, Winter Dreams (opposite Joanne Woodward), and appearing in two Tim Burton films at the tale-end of her career: Beetlejuice and Mars Attacks!.  This month, we'll take a look at Sidney's performance in Sabotage, as well as investigate much of her work prior to her late career resurgence, focusing on what her under-sung years as a star in the 1930s looked like.