Scott Sidney

Biography

Scott Sidney first learned to hold an audience as a hoofer and comic in rattling Midwestern stock houses and on the Mittenthal vaudeville wheel, trading quips and soft-shoe routines with his wife, Josephine Foy, in their skit “The Inspector.” One 1913 evening in a smoky Kansas City playhouse, Thomas H. Ince spotted the couple, signed Sidney on the spot, and by the end of the year the ex-performer was facing a camera instead of footlights. Within months he had stepped behind it, marshaling gag-men and cowboys for Ince’s rapidly expanding stable. A shrewd stake in the fledgling Christie Film Company kept his name on the door even while he chased actors across sun-baked sets. In 1925, claiming he was “through with picture-making,” he was lured back by Syd Chaplin to guide Charley’s Aunt onto the screen. Three years later, while strolling through foggy London, Sidney dropped dead of a heart attack at fifty-six, leaving laughter echoing in two continents.