1. Early life

2. Career
    Image and name 

3. Persona

4. Marriage and retirement

5. Death

6. Legacy

7. Filmography

8. Cultural references

9. Notes

10. References

11. Further reading

12. External links

Bara was one of the most popular actresses of the silent era, and one of cinema's earliest sex symbols. Her femme fatale roles earned her the nickname The Vamp (short for "vampire"),{{efn|These roles did not portray the undead vampires featured in later horror films. The term "vampire" for a seductive woman was derived from "The Vampire", an 1897 poem by Rudyard Kipling.^[2]}} later fueling the rising popularity in "vamp" roles that encapsulated exoticism and sexual domination.^[3] Bara made more than 40 films between 1914 and 1926, but most were lost in the 1937 Fox vault fire. After her marriage to Charles Brabin in 1921, she made two more feature films and then retired from acting in 1926, having never appeared in a sound film.

Early life

Bara was born Theodosia Burr Goodman on July 29, 1885 in the Avondale section of Cincinnati, Ohio.^[2] Her father was Bernard Goodman (1853–1936),^[4] a prosperous Jewish tailor born in Poland. Her mother, Pauline Louise Françoise (née de Coppett; 1861–1957), was born in Switzerland.^[5] Bernard and Pauline married in 1882. Theda had two siblings: Marque (1888–1954)^[6] and Esther (1897–1965),^[4] who also became a film actress under the name of Lori Bara. She was named after the daughter of US Vice President Aaron Burr.^[7]

Bara attended Walnut Hills High School, graduating in 1903. After attending the University of Cincinnati for two years, she worked mainly in local theater productions, but did explore other projects. After moving to New York City in 1908, she made her Broadway debut in The Devil (1908).{{citation needed|date=February 2018}}

Career

Most of Bara's early films were shot along the East Coast, where the film industry was centered at that time, primarily at the Fox Studios in Fort Lee, New Jersey.^[8]

Bara lived with her family in New York City during this time. The rise of Hollywood as the center of the American film industry forced her to relocate to Los Angeles to film the epic Cleopatra (1917), which became one of Bara's biggest hits. No known prints of Cleopatra exist today, but numerous photographs of Bara in costume as the Queen of the Nile have survived.{{citation needed|date = September 2017}}

Between 1915 and 1919, Bara was Fox studio's biggest star, but tired of being typecast as a vamp, she allowed her five-year contract with Fox to expire. Her final Fox film was The Lure of Ambition (1919). In 1920, she turned briefly to the stage, appearing on Broadway in The Blue Flame. Bara's fame drew large crowds to the theater, but her acting was savaged by critics.^[9]

Her career suffered without Fox studio's support, and she did not make another film until The Unchastened Woman (1925) for Chadwick Pictures. Bara retired after making only one more film, the short comedy Madame Mystery (1926), made for Hal Roach and directed by Stan Laurel, in which she parodied her vamp image.{{citation needed|date=September 2017}}

At the height of her fame, Bara earned $4,000 per week (the equivalent of over $56,000 per week in 2017 adjusted dollars). Bara's best-known roles were as the "vamp", although she attempted to avoid typecasting by playing wholesome heroines in films such as Under Two Flags and Her Double Life. She appeared as Juliet in a version of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. Although Bara took her craft seriously, she was too successful as an exotic "wanton woman" to develop a more versatile career.{{citation needed|date=September 2017}}

Image and name

The origin of Bara's stage name is disputed; The Guinness Book of Movie Facts and Feats says it came from director Frank Powell, who learned Theda had a relative named Barranger, and that "Theda" was a childhood nickname. In promoting the 1917 film Cleopatra, Fox Studio publicists noted that the name was an anagram of Arab death, and her press agents claimed inaccurately that she was "the daughter of an Arab sheik and a French woman, born in the Sahara."^[11][12] In 1917 the Goodman family legally changed its surname to Bara.^[4]

Bara is often cited as the first sex symbol of the film era.^[13][14]

Persona

Bara was known for wearing very revealing costumes in her films. Such outfits were banned from Hollywood films after the Production Code (a.k.a. the Hays Code) started in 1930, and then was more strongly enforced in 1934. It was popular at that time to promote an actress as mysterious, with an exotic background. The studios promoted Bara with a massive publicity campaign, billing her as the Egyptian-born daughter of a French actress and an Italian sculptor. They claimed she had spent her early years in the Sahara Desert under the shadow of the Sphinx, then moved to France to become a stage actress. (In fact, Bara had never been to either Egypt or France.) They called her the Serpent of the Nile and encouraged her to discuss mysticism and the occult in interviews. Some film historians point to this as the birth of two Hollywood phenomena: the studio publicity department and the press agent, which would later evolve into the public relations (PR) person.{{citation needed|date=September 2017}}

A 2016 book, by Joan Craig with Beverly F. Stout, chronicles many personal, first-hand accounts of the lives of Theda Bara and Charles Brabin.^[15] It reveals a great dichotomy between Theda Bara's screen persona and her real-life persona. Included are Bara's surprised responses to the critical reactions to her screen portrayals from a sector of the community. The author was befriended by Theda Bara and Charles Brabin beginning when she was a young girl. Ms. Craig's photographic-like memory paints an important picture of how they lived, where they lived, and what they said and did, even to the point of describing in great detail most of the rooms of their house. The book describes how Ms. Bara, who learned pattern making and wig making from her mother and father, designed and created most of the costumes and gowns she wore in her films, including the striking costumes she wore in Cleopatra.

Marriage and retirement

Bara married British-born American film director Charles Brabin in 1921. They honeymooned at The Pines Hotel in Digby, Nova Scotia, Canada, and later purchased a {{convert|400|ha|acre|adj=mid}} property down the coast from Digby at Harbourville overlooking the Bay of Fundy, eventually building a summer home they called Baranook.^[16] They had no children. Bara resided in a villa-style home in Cincinnati, which served as the "honors villa" at Xavier University in Cincinnati, Ohio. Demolition of the home began in July 2011.^[17]

In 1936, she appeared on Lux Radio Theatre during a broadcast version of The Thin Man with William Powell and Myrna Loy. She did not appear in the play but instead announced her plans to make a movie comeback,^[18][19] which never materialized. She appeared on radio again in 1939 as a guest on Texaco Star Theatre. These may be the only recordings of her voice ever made.{{citation needed|date=February 2018}}

In 1949, producer Buddy DeSylva and Columbia Pictures expressed interest in making a movie of Bara's life, to star Betty Hutton, but the project never materialized.^[20][21]

Death

On April 7, 1955, Bara died of stomach cancer in Los Angeles, California.^[22]

She was interred as Theda Bara Brabin at Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery in Glendale, California.^[23]

Legacy

For her contributions to the film industry, Bara received a motion pictures star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1960. Her star is located at 6307 Hollywood Boulevard.^[24]

She is one of the most famous completely silent stars – she never appeared in a sound film, lost or otherwise. A 1937 fire at Fox's nitrate film storage vaults in New Jersey destroyed most of that studio's silent films. Bara made more than 40 films between 1914 and 1926, but complete prints of only six still exist: The Stain (1914), A Fool There Was (1915), East Lynne (1916), The Unchastened Woman (1925), and two short comedies for Hal Roach.{{citation needed|date=September 2017}}

In addition to these, a few of her films remain in fragments, including Cleopatra (just a few seconds of footage), a clip thought to be from The Soul of Buddha, and a few other unidentified clips featured in a French documentary, Theda Bara et William Fox (2001). Most of the clips can be seen in the documentary The Woman with the Hungry Eyes (2006). As to vamping, critics stated that her portrayal of calculating, cold-hearted women was morally instructive to men. Bara responded by saying, "I will continue doing vampires as long as people sin.".^[25] Additional footage has been found which shows her behind the scenes on a picture.^[26] While the hairstyle has led some to theorize that this may be from The Lure Of Ambition, this has not been confirmed.

In 1994, she was honored with her image on a United States postage stamp designed by caricaturist Al Hirschfeld.{{citation needed|date = September 2017}} The Fort Lee Film Commission dedicated Main Street and Linwood Avenue in Fort Lee, New Jersey, as "Theda Bara Way" in May 2006 to honor Bara, who made many of her films at the Fox Studio on Linwood and Main.{{citation needed|date=September 2017}}

Over a period of several years, filmmaker and film historian Phillip Dye reconstructed Cleopatra on video. Titled Lost Cleopatra, the full length feature was created by editing together production still picture montages combined with the surviving film clip. The script was based on the original scenario with modifications derived from research into censorship reports, reviews of the film, and synopses from period magazines.^[27] Dye screened the film at the Hollywood Heritage Museum on February 8, 2017.^[28]

Filmography

Cultural references

Bara was one of three actresses (Pola Negri and Mae Murray were the others) whose eyes were combined to form the Chicago International Film Festival's logo, a stark, black and white close up of the composite eyes set as repeated frames in a strip of film.^[31]

The International Times logo is a black-and-white image of Theda Bara. The founders' intention had been to use an image of actress Clara Bow, 1920s "It girl", but a picture of Theda Bara was used by accident and, once deployed, not changed.^[32]

In June 1996, two biographies of Bara were released: Ron Genini's Theda Bara: A Biography (McFarland) and Eve Golden's Vamp (Emprise). In October 2005 TimeLine Films of Culver City premiered a film biography, Theda Bara: The Woman With the Hungry Eyes.

Bara has also been the subject of several works of fiction, including In Theda Bara's Tent by Diana Altman, The Director's Cut: A Theda Bara Mystery by Christopher DiGrazia and the play Theda Bara and the Frontier Rabbi by Bob Johnston.

Bara appears as a character in the books "Vampyres of Hollywood" and "Love Bites" by Adrienne Barbeau, and in Coldheart Canyon: A Hollywood Ghost Story by Clive Barker.

In season 2, episode 1 of The Lucy Show, Vivian Bagley and Lucy argue over who should play Cleopatra in an upcoming play; Lucy states "I've seen the movie twelve times!" and Vivian quips "She means the one with Theda Bara".

A photo of Bara as Cleopatra is the album artwork for The Lumineers record Cleopatra released in 2016.

In May 2016, a memoir titled Theda Bara, My Mentor, "Under the Wings of Hollywood's First Femme Fatale, by Joan Craig with Beverly Stout, was released. Young Joan, in the companionship of Bara during the 1940s and 1950s, includes tales of Bara's husband, Charles Brabin, friends Marion Davies, Clark Gable, Victor Fleming, and other significant stars of the past.

In season 2, episode 7 of the television series Downton Abbey, butler Carson describes the newly designed bathrooms at a nearby estate as "like something out of a film with Theda Bara".

Notes

References

Further reading

• Shakespeare on Silent Film: An Excellent Dumb Discourse by Judith Buchanan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Chapter 6. {{ISBN|0-521-87199-9}}.
• Famous Juliets by Jerome Hart, in Motion Picture Classic, March 1923.
• A Million and One Nights by Terry Ramsaye. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1926.
• {{cite book | author=Susan Fox | title=William Fox: A Story of Early Hollywood 1915–1930 | publisher=Midnight Marquee Press Inc | year=2006 | isbn=1-887664-62-9}}
• {{cite book | author=Christopher DiGrazia | title=The Director's Cut: A Theda Bara Mystery | publisher=1921 PVG Publishing | year=2011 | isbn=0-9827709-4-4}}
• {{cite book | author=Bob Johnston | title=Theda Bara and the Frontier Rabbi | publisher=Dramatist's Play Service | year=2002 | isbn=0-8222-1837-2}}
• {{cite book | author=Diana Altman | title=In Theda Bara's Tent | publisher=Tapley Cove Press | year=2010 | isbn= 0-615-34327-9}}

External links

• {{IMDb name|847}}
• {{Amg name|3781}}
• {{Tcmdb name}}
• {{IBDB name}}
• [https://web.archive.org/web/20120716222612/http://www.classicimages.com/1996/july/theda.html Excerpt from Golden's biography Vamp]
• [https://web.archive.org/web/20030805031539/http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~pringle/silent/ssotm/May96/ Biography at monash.edu.au]
• Theda Bara photo gallery NY Public Library Billy Rose collection
• "Theda Bara", entry in Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia

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