Sydne Rome was considered the golden girl from the American Midwest, who started her career in Europe and enchanted millions. Unfortunately, she eventually decided to leave Hollywood behind after an accident left her scarred for life.
Rome first showed interest in acting while at high school. None of her parents, not even a member of her family, was in the acting business, but she somehow fell for it.
“There was nothing in the family that should have given me my craze for acting,” she told the Daily News in 1974. “My father had a plastic company, and my mother is just ‘mom.’ I have two sisters and two brothers, all younger.”
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Rome had other plans for the future, but the thought of becoming an actress was there and she decided to listen to her heart so she moved to Pennsylvania, and the famous Carnegie Tech School of Acting at Pittsburgh University.
“I planned to enter Northwestern University after finishing high school. But there, I was told that if I were seriously interested in acting, I should study at Tech. So I did, and I’m glad I did,” she told The Pittsburgh Press.
At university, she was coached by the likes of voice actress Edith Skinner and Bern Stearn, which led to roles in several stage productions, including Tania in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Nina in Anton Chekhov’s The Sea Gull.
However, once she graduated from the university, Rome had a hard time finding her way to the place where dreams come true, Hollywood. She was rejected for the role in the film Candy so after another year with the Pasadena Playhouse she decided to try her luck in Europe.
Speaking of that chapter of her life, Rome told the Daily News, “I had a terrible time in Rome with young Italian directors who wanted me to play in the nude. I didn’t want to do it. Now my view is different. Playing in the nude has become part of our trade. Provided it is really called for in the script and doesn’t involve brutal love scenes, it’s OK by me.”
In 1972, she had her big breakthrough which dubbed her “the up-and-coming Jean Harlow or Raquel Welch, the ticking Sex Bomb of the nineteen-eighties,” the film What? directed by Roman Polanski.
“[Brigitte] is wonderful, exciting, very open, terribly available. She is everyman’s dream. Perhaps at first look, I seem less available. But I think audiences will take a second look and think differently. And I am a better actress than Bardot,” Rome once said of people comparing her to Bardot.
As the 70s were coming to an end, Rome starred in David Hemmings’s film Just a Gigolo alongside David Bowie, with whom she allegedly had an affair, according to the media.
“We were friends. When I was going to Berlin to have the first [script] readings, I was told that they hadn’t found the leading man. He [Bowie] had an interest in that period of Germany, between the two world wars, so I thought maybe David would like to do this part. I called him and asked if I could send him the script. We did so and he accepted,” she told NME in 2021.