Sydne had an unusual career path for a kid from Upper Sandusky, Ohio. Early in her acting career, she flew to Rome to audition for the title role in Candy, and essentially never returned. She told an Akron newspaper that she fell in love and decided to stay in Europe. She eventually became an Italian citizen, converted from Judaism to Catholicism, and worked her entire life in European cinema.
Somewhere along the line she decided to shave five years off her age. IMDb lists her birth year as 1951, but Wikipedia has the correct date of 1946. We know 1946 is right because there is plenty of information available about her at ancestry.com, including census data and many yearbook pictures from every year of her high school days. Those pictures demonstrate that she entered high school in September of 1960 with short dark hair that had a bit of a wave to it. Her hair got longer, straighter and lighter every year.
Somehow the dark-haired Jewish girl, an American born in 1946, had miraculously become a blonde Italian Catholic born in 1951! Fortunately for us, neither of her religions seemed to discourage her from doing nude scenes. Roman Polanski’s What?, pictured below, featured her best nude performance, but she turned in many others between 1969 and 1977.
In 2009, she was in a terrible auto accident that disfigured her face and robbed her of her great beauty, but she continued to act, and is still acting to this day, although she is approaching 80. In a perfect bit of symmetry, her most recent film was also directed by Roman Polanski (The Palace, 2023), more than 50 years after he had directed her in the scenes below.
Video –
I love a Jewish woman with a full bush.
Or pretty much any woman with a full bush. Works for me.
Knew she was American, but didn’t know she was a local babe! 😍
Dig that bizarro 1970s lamp!
the old tan-line bikinis still do it for me