Theda Bara
Theda Bara was an American silent film and stage actress.
Bara was one of the more popular actresses of the silent era and one of cinema's early sex symbols. Her femme fatale roles earned her the nickname "The Vamp", later fueling the rising popularity in "vamp" roles that encapsulated exoticism and sexual domination. 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, never appearing in a sound film.
Early life
Bara was born Theodosia Burr Goodman on July 29, 1885 in the Avondale section of Cincinnati, Ohio. She was named after the daughter of US Vice President Aaron Burr. Her father was Bernard Goodman, a prosperous Jewish tailor born in Poland. Her mother, Pauline Louise Françoise, was born in Switzerland. Bernard and Pauline married in 1882. Theda had two younger siblings: Marque and Esther, who also became a film actress under the name of Lori Bara.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 the same year in The Devil.
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.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, 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.
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. 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.
Her career suffered without Fox studio's support, and she did not make another film until The Unchastened Woman for Chadwick Pictures. Bara retired after making only one more film, the short comedy Madame Mystery, made for Hal Roach and directed by Stan Laurel, in which she parodied her vamp image.
At the height of her fame, Bara earned $4,000 per week. Bara's better-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.
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, to enhance her exotic appeal to moviegoers, falsely promoted the young Ohio native as "the daughter of an Arab sheik and a French woman, born in the Sahara." In 1917, the Goodman family legally changed its surname to Bara.Persona
Bara was known for wearing very revealing costumes in her films. Such outfits were banned from Hollywood films after the Production 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. 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.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. 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 property down the coast from Digby at Harbourville, Nova Scotia, overlooking the Bay of Fundy, eventually building a summer home they called Baranook. They had no children. Bara resided in a villa-style home in Cincinnati, which served as the "honors villa" at Xavier University. Demolition of the home began in July 2011.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, which never materialized. She appeared on radio again in 1939 as a guest on Texaco Star Theatre.
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.
Death
On April 7, 1955, after a lengthy stay at California Lutheran Hospital in Los Angeles, Bara died there of stomach cancer. She was survived by her husband Charles Brabin, her mother, and sister Lori. She was interred as Theda Bara Brabin at Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery in Glendale, California.Legacy
Bara often is cited as the first sex symbol of the film era.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.
Bara 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, A Fool There Was, East Lynne, The Unchastened Woman, and two short comedies for Hal Roach.
In addition to these, a few of her films remain in fragments, including Cleopatra, a clip thought to be from The Soul of Buddha, and a few other unidentified clips featured in the documentary Theda Bara et William Fox. Most of the clips can be seen in the documentary The Woman with the Hungry Eyes. 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." Additional footage has been found which shows her behind the scenes on a picture. 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 U.S. postage stamp designed by caricaturist Al Hirschfeld. 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.
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. Dye screened the film at the Hollywood Heritage Museum on February 8, 2017.
Filmography
| Year | Film | Role | Notes |
| 1914 | The Stain | Gang moll | Credited as Theodosia Goodman |
| 1915 | A Fool There Was | The Vampire | |
| 1915 | The Kreutzer Sonata | Celia Friedlander | Lost film |
| 1915 | The Clemenceau Case | Iza | Lost film |
| 1915 | The Devil's Daughter | Gioconda Dianti | Lost film |
| 1915 | Lady Audley's Secret | Helen Talboys | Lost film |
| 1915 | The Two Orphans | Henriette | Lost film |
| 1915 | Sin | Rosa | Lost film |
| 1915 | Carmen | Carmen | Lost film |
| 1915 | The Galley Slave | Francesca Brabaut | Lost film |
| 1915 | Destruction | Fernade | Lost film |
| 1916 | The Serpent | Vania Lazar | Lost film |
| 1916 | Gold and the Woman | Theresa Decordova | Lost film |
| 1916 | The Eternal Sapho | Laura Bruffins | Lost film |
| 1916 | East Lynne | Lady Isabel Carlisle | |
| 1916 | Under Two Flags | Cigarette | Lost film |
| 1916 | Her Double Life | Mary Doone | Lost film |
| 1916 | Romeo and Juliet | Juliet | Lost film |
| 1916 | The Vixen | Elsie Drummond | Lost film |
| 1917 | The Darling of Paris | Esmeralda | Lost film |
| 1917 | The Tiger Woman | Princess Petrovitch | Lost film |
| 1917 | Her Greatest Love | Hazel | Lost film |
| 1917 | Heart and Soul | Jess | Lost film |
| 1917 | Camille | Marguerite Gauthier | Lost film |
| 1917 | Cleopatra | Cleopatra | Approximately 20 seconds exist |
| 1917 | The Rose of Blood | Lisza Tapenka | Lost film |
| 1917 | Madame Du Barry | Jeanne Vaubernier | Lost film |
| 1918 | The Forbidden Path | Mary Lynde | Lost film |
| 1918 | The Soul of Buddha | Priestess | Story, Lost film |
| 1918 | Under the Yoke | Maria Valverda | Lost film |
| 1918 | Salomé | Salome | Lost film |
| 1918 | When a Woman Sins | Lilian Marchard / Poppea | Lost film |
| 1918 | The She-Devil | Lorette | Lost film |
| 1919 | The Light | Blanchette Dumond, aka Madame Lefresne | Lost film |
| 1919 | When Men Desire | Marie Lohr | Lost film |
| 1919 | The Siren's Song | Marie Bernais | Lost film |
| 1919 | A Woman There Was | Princess Zara | Lost film |
| 1919 | Kathleen Mavourneen | Kathleen Cavanagh | Lost film |
| 1919 | La Belle Russe | Fleurett Sackton/La Belle Russe | Lost film |
| 1919 | The Lure of Ambition | Olga Dolan | Lost film; 82-second outtake does exist |
| 1925 | The Unchastened Woman | Caroline Knollys | |
| 1926 | Madame Mystery | Madame Mysterieux | Short film |
| 1926 | 45 Minutes from Hollywood | Herself | Short film |
Cultural references
Bara was one of three actresses 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.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.
In June 1996, two biographies of Bara were released: Ron Genini's Theda Bara: A Biography and Eve Golden's Vamp. In October 2005 TimeLine Films of Culver City premiered the film biography Theda Bara: The Woman with the Hungry Eyes.
Bara has 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 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".