Some of my favorite people have birthdays in early August. There are my friends Albert (who braved the Hammer Museum screening of Check and Double Check with me last year) and my friend John (who recently became a neighbor). Then there are the people I've never met, but who I wish I could have known, like Sylvia Sidney. Today is a day to celebrate her centennial.


Despite her decades of work in film and television, my first encounter with Sylvia Sidney came as it did for most of my generation, via Tim Burton, who cast her in Beetle Juice and Mars Attacks, the latter of which was her last role (if you don't count her stint on Fantasy Island). What a great one, too!

My first taste of classic Sylvia came in the form of Fritz Lang's thriller Fury, the American debut of German director Fritz Lang, in which she plays the fiancee of the victim of a lynch mod (Spencer Tracy). I caught this movie, a great one, on TV a couple of weeks ago, and was newly-mesmerized by Sidney, with her feline eyes and endearing screen presence.


Above: Sylvia watches as flames engulf her man in Fury. Below: Sylvia and John Loder compare appetizer preferences in Sabotage.


Lang cast Sylvia in his next film, You Only Live Once, in which she plays a thinly-veiled Bonnie Parker character to Henry Fonda's Clyde. Had things worked out a few years earlier, she might have also been directed by Sergei Eisenstein in An American Tragedy. Going back even further, she might have appeared in The Godless Girl, one of Cecil B. deMille's best movies.


Sylvia Sidney's career spanned more than one hundred feature films and television shows and lasted seven decades. Glancing over both her body of work and the information about her private life that's out there, one gets the sense that she lived very much the way she wanted. She could relax in her antique farmhouse in Connecticut, indulge in needlepoint, tell it like it is about the business (her comment about working with Alfred Hitchcock is golden) and make some refreshingly left-field acting choices every year or so (the Omen sequal, for instance).

Tortured divas like Crawford, Garbo and even Clara Bow get lots of coverage from celebrity biographers. Sylvia Sidney seems to have lived a life that was happy, creatively fulfilling and an inspiration to all of us who want to follow our bliss, do good work and spice up life with a little variety now and then.


Could this glamorous creature, with lilies down her back, imagine that, one day, she would save humanity from annihilation simply by listening to Indian Love Call?

As an aside, here's a photo of me from yesterday, waiting to see All About Eve (for the first time) at the Hollywood Forever cemetery. Taken by the above-mentioned Alberto. (Shout out to Michael, who insisted I come with.) I don't think I've ever posted a photo of my on here, so enjoy!



To indulge your Sylvia-love a little more, check out Dr. Macro's Annex (the source for the above photos), ShillPages and Starlet Showcase.