Syd Saylor

Biography

Leo Sailor, a.k.a. Syd Saylor, was born into a very notable family. His father, George Sailor, was a renowned engineer, and was often called out to various locations for consultation and evaluation. In 1906 he was called to San Francisco on a job, and he had no sooner checked into his hotel than the city was devastated by the notorious 1906 earthquake. Mr. Sailor was never seen again, and was presumed to have been one of many to have died in the quake. That left Syd and his brother without a father, and to remedy that situation his mother's brother Ed moved in with the family. Syd decided to follow his uncle Ed's advice; he studied hard and had the help of his uncle as a tutor. Syd soon joined several local actors groups. While appearing in a variety of plays put on by the troupe, Syd discovered that he had a talent for making people laugh, and his other uncle--a captain in the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department who was a former member of Mack Sennett's comedy troupe The Keystone Kops--encouraged him to go to Los Angeles to break into the film industry. Syd did just that, and his uncle used the connections he had in the film industry to get Syd's foot in the door. Syd became a prolific character actor, recognizable by his bulging eyes, stuttering speech and a protruding Adam's apple that bobbed up and down like a pogo stick. He appeared in everything from comedies (in the 1920s he had his own series of two-reel shorts) to westerns, usually as the hero's sidekick. He wasn't just a one-note comic, though. He had a small but touching role as a lonely patient in a psychiatric hospital in The Snake Pit (1948), who goes to the facility's annual dance and desperately and sadly looks for a woman to dance with him. He appeared in more than 170 films, and died of a heart attack in Hollywood in 1962.