Sidney Kibrick, who portrayed the bad boy known as “Woim” in Our Gang comedy film shorts in the 1930s, has died. He was 97.
Kibrick died Saturday at a hospital in Northridge, his daughter, Jane Lipsic, told The Hollywood Reporter.
Kibrick appeared in about two dozen Our Gang/Little Rascals films, made at Hal Roach Studios and/or MGM, from 1935-39. As Woim — that’s Brooklynese for “worm” — he was the henchkid for the neighborhood bully Butch (Tommy Bond).
It was a grind making those shorts, he told Nick Thomas in a 2023 interview. “We’d have two hours of schooling in the morning and then work anywhere from six to 16 hours until we finished,” he said. “There was a lot of work, no question about it, but our director Gordon Douglas was a terrific guy, and he was really able to get a lot out of each kid.”
His older brother, Leonard Kibrick, had played the main troublemaker in the series, giving Spanky (George McFarland), Alfalfa (Carl Switzer), Buckwheat (Billie Thomas) and Darla (Darla Hood) a hard time, before Bond replaced him in 1936.
The youngest of three kids, Sidney Henry Kibrick was born in Minneapolis on July 2, 1928. He came to Los Angeles as an infant with his family.
“My mother took us to Grauman’s Chinese Theatre and after the movie, a man came over to us, pointed at me and said he could ‘use that little kid in the movies,’” Kibrick recalled. His parents really wanted him and his brother to get into acting.
The boys got started in 1933, appearing in Raoul Walsh’s The Bowery (1933), starring Wallace Beery, George Raft and Jackie Cooper. Leonard, who was about four years older than Sidney, appeared in his first Our Gang film in 1934 (he died in 1993 at age 68).
Kibrick said he was earning $750 a week for the shorts, “a lot in those days, especially during the Depression,” he told Thomas. He also was showing up in such features as Shirley Temple’s Just Around the Corner (1938), Tyrone Power’s Jesse James (1939) and Glenn Ford’s Flight Lieutenant (1942).
“But by the time I was 15, I’d had enough,” he said. “My parents wanted me to continue, but finally my mother went along with my wishes.” His last onscreen credit was the Bowery Boys movie Keep ‘Em Slugging (1943).
Kibrick went on to attend college at USC and become a impeccably dressed real estate developer in Southern California while putting together an Our Gang reunion in 1981 and remaining friends with McFarland, who died in 1993.
“Spanky worked for Westinghouse in Dallas,” he told Fox News in 2022. “He would come over with his family here in Beverly Hills, and I would do the same with mine.”
Also that year, Kibrick and family members attended the opening of an exhibit at the Hollywood Museum honoring the 100th anniversary of the Our Gang series. As perhaps the last surviving actor of those films, he was still getting fan mail at the time of his death.
In addition to his daughter, survivors include his son-in-law, Marty; his granddaughter, Dana, and his grandson; Adam; his great-granddaughters, Emma, Mia and Lily, and his great-grandson, Landon; and his companion, Eunice David. His wife of 65 years, Greta, died in 2013 at age 83.
“I think people, even today, could identify with being a child and being mischievous when life was simple,” he said of the lasting impact of the Our Gang comedies. “It was fun, and it made people laugh. … I was living the studio life. Those are memories I will never forget. It was a wonderful experience.”
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