BRONX- born actress Sylvia Sidney – one of Hollywood’s top female stars of the 1930s who made a dramatic comeback in the ’70s and was still working in movies and TV – died yesterday at the age of 88.

The scrappy, silver-haired star, a lifelong chain-smoker, died of throat cancer at Lenox Hill Hospital.

In her heyday as one of Paramount’s leading ladies Sidney’s specialty was playing hapless victims.

She portrayed a slum girl murdered by her fiance in “An American Tragedy” (1931), the nice girlfriend of racketeer Gary Cooper in “City Streets” (1931) and Spencer Tracy’s girl, falsely accused of murder, in “Fury” (1936).

In an effort to change her goody-goody image, she traveled to England to star in Alfred Hitchcock’s “Sabotage” (1936), in which she coldbloodedly murders her evil husband.

A year later she got top billing over Humphrey Bogart in the classic Lower East Side drama “Dead End” (1937), playing an ambitious working girl. She appeared with Bogie again in “The Wagons Roll at Midnight” (1941).

All but forgotten in the ’70s, she made a dramatic comeback in the 1973 drama “Summer Wishes, Winter Dreams,” in which she played Joanne Woodward’s doomed mother.

The role won her an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress.

Younger audiences knew her for her later roles in Tim Burton’s movies: as a cranky spiritual adviser in “Beetlejuice” (1988), and a wheelchair-bound grandma who helps save the world in “Mars Attacks!” (1996). Sidney, a descendant of Russian Jews, was born Sophia Kosow in New York City on Aug. 8, 1910.

She has no survivors. A memorial service is scheduled for Aug. 9 at the National Arts Club in New York.