To print this page, select "Print" from the File menu of your browser salon.com > People July 2, 1999 URL: http://www.salon.com/people/obit/1999/07/02/sidney Sylvia Sidney The waiflike star of the 1930s left Hollywood after being typecast as a victim one too many times, but won an Oscar and a Golden Globe award after her comeback in 1973. - - - - - - - - - - - - Sylvia Sidney, the waiflike star of the 1930s who specialized in playing victims and got an Oscar nomination in 1973 for a comeback role in ''Summer Wishes, Winter Dreams,'' died Thursday of throat cancer. She was 88. Ms. Sidney made her professional theater debut at 16 and was still acting 70 years later, with a brief appearance in the 1988 hit ''Beetlejuice'' and a small role in ''Mars Attacks'' in 1996. She had recently signed a seven-year contract for a recurring role on the TV series ''Fantasy Island.'' After breaking into films in the late '20s, she became one of Paramount's top actresses. The others, Marlene Dietrich, Claudette Colbert and Carole Lombard among them, were tough and sharp-witted the way Ms. Sidney was in person. But her film specialty was playing victims: the slum girl murdered by her fiance in ''An American Tragedy,'' the nice girlfriend of racketeer Gary Cooper in ''City Streets,'' the nice girlfriend of Spencer Tracy, falsely accused of murder, in ''Fury.'' Among the directors she worked with were Rouben Mamoulian, in ''City Streets,'' 1931; Josef von Sternberg, in ''An American Tragedy,'' 1931; Alfred Hitchcock in ''Sabotage'' (also called ''A Woman Alone''), 1936; William Wyler, in ''Dead End,'' 1937; and Fritz Lang in ''Fury,'' 1936, ''You Only Live Once,'' 1937, and ''You and Me,'' 1938. But she tired of being typecast as a victim, referring in an interview years later to ''the days when they used to pay me by the teardrop.'' She enjoyed her infrequent comedies, such as ''Merrily We Go to Hell,'' 1932, and ''Thirty-Day Princess,'' 1934. And she turned away from films more and more, returning to the stage in such productions as ''The Gentle People'' in 1939; ''Angel Street'' in 1941; ''The Fourposter'' in 1951; and ''Enter Laughing'' in 1963. ''I didn't leave Hollywood because of anybody but myself,'' she once said. ''I just got disgusted with myself. I didn't know who I was, as an actress or a person.'' Her return to the screen was in the 1973 drama ''Summer Wishes, Winter Dreams,'' in which she played Joanne Woodward's doomed mother. She was nominated for an Academy Award for best supporting actress. In 1986, she won a Golden Globe award and was nominated for an Emmy for ''An Early Frost,'' a TV movie in which she played the grandmother of an AIDS patient. In ''Beetlejuice,'' Ms. Sidney played a cranky otherworldly adviser to a husband and wife who die and must learn the ways of the spirit world. Ms. Sidney, a descendant of Russian Jews, was born Sophia Kosow in New York City on Aug. 8, 1910. She began taking dancing lessons at age 10 and was a teen-ager when she made her professional stage debut in 1926. She married three times, to publisher Bennett Cerf, actor Luther Adler and publicist Carlton Alsop. All three marriages ended in divorce. Jacob Adler, her only child, died in the mid-1980s of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig's disease. After he fell ill, Ms. Sidney became a volunteer for the National ALS Foundation. Ms. Sidney also was an accomplished needlepoint artist and wrote two books on the subject salon.com | July 2, 1999