Sylvia Sidney

Born in the Bronx and trained at the Theatre Guild school, Sylvia Sidney had enormous, expressive eyes that seemed permanently on the verge of tears, and Hollywood in the early 1930s knew exactly what to do with them. As mass unemployment and hardship gripped the country, she became the definitive screen victim of a cruel society: the working-class girl, the gangster's moll, the wife of the wrongly condemned, suffering the injustices of the age in close-up while audiences wept with her.

She worked with the finest directors drawn to social themes. For Fritz Lang she made a trio of despairing pictures, most powerfully Fury (1936), in which she watches a lynch mob nearly murder her fiance, and You Only Live Once, an ex-convict's doomed flight from a world that will not forgive him. For Alfred Hitchcock she brought heartbreaking tenderness to Sabotage (1936). In Dead End (1937) she embodied the trapped decency of the tenement poor. More than almost any star of her time, she gave a human face to the political anger of the 1930s.

As those roles faded, Sidney refused to disappear. She returned to the stage, toured tirelessly, and became an authority on needlepoint, publishing books on the craft. Then, decades after her stardom, she reinvented herself as one of the screen's great character actresses. She earned an Academy Award nomination for Summer Wishes, Winter Dreams (1973), and introduced herself to entirely new generations as the chain-smoking, exasperated caseworker of the afterlife in Tim Burton's Beetlejuice (1988) and as a wry survivor in Mars Attacks!.

By the time she died in 1999, she had acted in eight decades, from silent-adjacent early talkies to the modern blockbuster, a span almost no one in film history can match. The tearful ingenue of the breadlines had become a tart, indestructible old pro, and both versions of her were unmistakably, indelibly herself.