Theda Bara

Theda Bara ( ; born Theodosia Burr Goodman; July 29, 1885 – April 7, 1955) 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" (short for ''vampire'', here meaning a seductive woman), later fueling the rising popularity in "vamp" roles based in exoticism and sexual domination. The studios promoted a fictitious persona for Bara as an Egyptian-born woman interested in the occult. Bara made more than 40 films between 1914 and 1926, but most are now lost, having perished 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; she 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. She was named after the daughter of US Vice President Aaron Burr. Her father was Bernard Goodman (1853–1936), a prosperous Jewish tailor from Poland. Her mother, Pauline Louise Françoise ( de Coppett; 1861–1957), was born in Switzerland. Bernard and Pauline married in 1882. Theda had two younger siblings: Marque (1888–1954) and Esther (1897–1965), who also became a film actress, under the screen name, 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 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'' (1917), which became one of her biggest hits. No prints of ''Cleopatra'' are known to exist today, but numerous photographs of Bara in costume as the Queen of the Nile have survived.

Bara was the Fox studio's biggest star between 1915 and 1919, but tired of being typecast as a vamp, she allowed her five-year contract with the company 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.

Her career suffered without Fox Studios' support, and she did not make another film until ''The Unchastened Woman'' (1925) for Chadwick Pictures. She retired after making only one more film, the short comedy ''Madame Mystery'' (1926), directed by Stan Laurel for Hal Roach; in this, Bara parodied her vamp image.

At the height of her fame, Bara earned $4,000 per week (the equivalent of over $56,000 per week in 2017 adjusted dollars). Her 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 playing exotic wanton women 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 Baranger, 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 (a.k.a. the Hays Code) started in 1930 under Will H. Hays and then rigorously enforced beginning in mid-1934 by Joseph Breen. 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 never had been to Egypt, and her time in France amounted to just a few months.)

A 2016 book by Joan Craig and Beverly F. Stout chronicles many personal, first-hand accounts of the lives of Bara and her husband Charles Brabin.

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 of stomach cancer. She was survived by her husband, her mother, and her younger 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'' (1914), '' A Fool There Was'' (1915), ''East Lynne'' (1916), ''The Unchastened Woman'' (1925), and two short comedies for Hal Roach.

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 the 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." 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. Small fragments from '' Salome'' were discovered in 2021 by an intern at Filmoteca Española.

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

Cultural references

The short piano suite ''Silhouettes from the Screen'', Op. 55 (1919) by Mortimer Wilson includes a miniature musical portrait of Theda Bara, who is portrayed in an atonal, expressionistic style.

Bara is referenced in the 1921 Bert Kalmar/Harry Ruby

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