After a certain point in her career, Sylvia Sidney (1910-1999) became known as a vivid character actress who enjoyed strong roles in stage and television productions - and occasionally in films including Tim Burton's 1988 Beetlejuice. But in the early years of her career, Sidney was one of the leading female stars at Paramount Pictures, alongside such luminaries as Marlene Dietrich, Claudette Colbert and Carole Lombard. In this mini-tribute, TCM takes a look at four of Sidney's non-Paramount films from her early years of stardom.

Sidney was born Sophia Kosow in the Bronx to Jewish immigrants of Romanian and Russian descent. Her parents divorced and her mother remarried, to which Sidney took the last name of her stepfather who adopted her. She trained at the Theater Guild School before appearing in several New York stage productions. She was spotted by a Hollywood talent scout in 1926 and made her first film in 1927, Broadway Nights (Barbara Stanwyck also made her movie debut in this film).

Often playing the wistful, put-upon girlfriend of a strong leading man, Sidney made a name for herself despite her more glamorous competition. She appeared opposite such major stars as Cary Grant, Spencer Tracy, Humphrey Bogart, Joel McCrea and Henry Fonda; and worked with such leading directors as Alfred Hitchcock and Fritz Lang.

The first of the films in our tribute is King Vidor's Street Scene (1931), produced by Samuel Goldwyn and adapted by Elmer Rice from his play about a volatile two days in the lives of residents of a tenement in Hell's Kitchen. Sidney plays a young woman whose parents are involved in a violent love triangle. Our second film is MGM's Fury (1936), directed by Lang, with Sidney cast as the fiancée of a man (Spencer Tracy) who is falsely believed to have been murdered by a mob. Sidney and the rest of the cast were praised in The New York Times for their "splendid performances."

Next up is ...One Third of a Nation (1939), another tenement drama, this time adapted from a "Living Newspaper" play produced by the Federal Theatre Project. Dudley Murphy directs a cast that includes Sidney as the sister of a boy (director-to-be Sidney Lumet) who is injured in a fire, and Leif Erickson as a wealthy real estate developer who feels responsible for the boy's plight. The last film of the tribute is The Wagons Roll at Night (1941), produced at Warner Bros. and directed by Ray Enright. This film is a circus drama with Bogart as the manager of a trouble-prone traveling troupe and Sidney as his fortune-teller girlfriend.

Sidney won an Oscar nomination as Best Supporting Actress for Summer Wishes, Winter Dreams (1973) and Emmy nominations for an episode of The Defenders (1961) and the TV movie An Early Frost (1985). Her numerous onstage characters included everything from the beleaguered heroine of Angel Street to the madcap title role in Auntie Mame. She was married and divorced three times; her husbands were publisher Bennett Cerf, actor Luther Adler and radio producer Carlton Alsop.

by Roger Fristoe