Magnificent Beauty Sylvia Sidney Large Original 1930s William Walling Photograph

Magnificent Beauty Sylvia Sidney Large Original 1930s William Walling Photograph (image 3/[null, null, null])

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ITEM: This is a 1930s, large format, vintage and original Golden Age of Hollywood glamour photograph of actress Sylvia Sidney. Photographed by Paramount Pictures portraitist William Walling, Sidney is sublimely beautiful in this glamorously lit and handsomely composed view. A striking Art Deco portrait, Sidney's heart shaped face and eternally somber eyes have been captured to perfection in this single shot. With portraits like this it is no wonder she earned herself the nickname " The Saddest Eyes in Hollywood".Sidney was a prolific stage, screen and film actress whose career spanned over 70 years. She rose to prominence in dozens of leading roles in the 1930s. She later gained attention for her role as Juno, a case worker in the afterlife, in Tim Burton's film Beetlejuice , for which she won a Saturn Award as Best Supporting Actress. She also was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her performance in Summer Wishes, Winter Dreams (1973).Photograph measures 10.25" x 13" on a glossy, single weight paper stock with ink stamps and notations on verso.Guaranteed to be 100% vintage and original from Grapefruit Moon Gallery.More about Sylvia Sidney:During the Great Depression, actress Sylvia Sidney was said to possess the saddest eyes in Hollywood. The native New Yorker had only just debuted on Broadway when the movies lured her westward, where she cornered the market playing little ladies with big problems in "City Streets" (1930) and "An American Tragedy" (1930). (The actress once joked that Paramount paid her by the tear.) In time, she enjoyed more varied roles, among them "Madame Butterfly" (1932), while Fritz Lang made expressionistic use of her in "Fury" (1936) and "You Only Live Once" (1937). Sidney also found sanctuary on the stage, performing with the Group Theatre on Broadway and touring as Jane Eyre and Eliza Doolittle. Sidney was later drawn out of retirement to play Joanne Woodward's elderly mother in "Summer Wishes, Winter Dreams" (1973), for which she received an Oscar nomination. The attention propelled Sydney towards a comeback, in which the diminutive yet wholly indomitable actress was a bracing presence in such films as "Damien: Omen II" (1978), "Beetlejuice" (1988), "Used People" (1992), and "Mars Attacks!" (1998). A lifelong smoker, Sydney succumbed to throat cancer in 1999, her death capping the picaresque career of a leading lady whose star shone bright.Sylvia Sidney was born Sophia Kosow in the Bronx, NY on Aug. 8, 1910. The daughter of Jewish immigrants from Russia and Romania, she was adopted by her stepfather, dentist Sigmund Sidney, after her parents' divorce. Suffering from shyness and developing a stammer, Sidney was enrolled in elocution lessons and, later, the Theatre Guild School of Acting. Sidney made her professional stage debut at age 16 in a 1926 production of the Ashley Miller-Hyman Adler drama "The Challenge of Youth" in the Polis Theater in Washington, D.C. She debuted on Broadway the following year as a replacement for Lionel Atwill's staging of the Jean Bart drama "The Squall." She returned to the Great White Way to play a virtuous city girl bedeviled by gangsters in Samuel Shipman and John B. Hymer's melodrama "Crime" and as the fiancée of a convicted anarchist in the Maxwell Anderson-Harold Hickerson polemic "Gods of the Lightning," based on the highly-publicized Sacco and Vanzetti trial. Spotted by Hollywood talent scouts, she was coaxed westward and made her film debut in the courtroom drama "Thru Different Eyes" (1928).Sidney's heart-shaped face, luminous eyes, and bee-stung lips endeared her to Depression era audiences. She spent the next two years bouncing back and forth between East and West Coasts, returning to Broadway to play an unwed mother in the Marion Gering drama "Bad Girl," in which she caught the eye of Paramount Pictures' head of production B. P. Schulberg. Schulberg hired Sydney to replace Clara Bow as Gary Cooper's lover in Rouben Mamoulian's "City Streets" (1930) and to play a pregnant factory worker drowne... read more

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