1915: A silent film called A Fool There Was shocked America. The plot: a devious woman seduces a married man.
A line from the movie was considered scandalous. The seductress said, “Kiss me, my fool.”
The exotic actress who starred in the motion picture became instantly famous as a “vamp.”
Her name was Theda Bara, the first of the movie sex symbols.
Hypnotic sex appeal and wearing scanty, revealing costumes onscreen made her famous.
She appeared in a whopping 39 films between 1915 and 1919.
Titles included The Devil’s Daughter, Sin, The Serpent, The Eternal Sappho, The Vixen, and The Tiger Woman.
Many of her roles were as a woman of loose morals. Bara often balanced them out with wholesome movies, but her spicier roles proved more popular.
Press releases declared that the diminutive woman with hypnotic eyes and jet black hair was born in the Saharan desert near the Sphinx. Her father was an Arabian sheik and her mother was a French actress.
A Washington newspaper declared that Theda Bara had been a Parisian stage actress who starred at the Theater Antoine. She’d fled Europe for America because of the World War.
Another publication wrote that she inherited a wolfhound from her friend, a Russian countess.
During press interviews, Bara dressed provocatively, spoke with an accent, and delved into the occult, which added more intrigue to her persona.
But it was all an act. If the public discovered the truth, it would ruin her career.
Her real name was Theodosia Goodman, and she was a nice Jewish girl from Cincinnati.
Born in 1885, Theda moved to New York City to become a stage actress. She then crossed the Hudson to Fort Lee, New Jersey - the center for film-making in that era - and made her first silent movie, A Fool There Was, at age 30.
Her image as a man-eater was carefully crafted, and the general public loved to hate her. People thought she was that character in real life. So she and the movie studio perpetuated the charade.
In 1917, she moved to Los Angeles, which had become the new movie capital. There she filmed her biggest hit, Cleopatra, a big budget blockbuster.
Her sex appeal was never more powerful than in that picture. Still photos from the movie showed Bara essentially naked beneath a gossamer costume.
After becoming the highest paid actress in the motion picture business, Fox Studios refused to renew her contract. So she abruptly retired in 1919.
In 1921, she married Charles Brabin, a divorcee 11 years her senior who had directed her in movies. A Justice of the Peace married them in a quiet ceremony.
They were physical opposites: Theda was short and sexy. Brabin was tall with a face like a slab of granite.
Theda Bara’s final movie appearance was in a 1926 Hal Roach silent comedy called Madame Mystery. Stan Laurel directed but didn’t appear onscreen, though Oliver Hardy did. The 20-minute short was not a hit.
Then Bara never worked in films again. Her return to the New York stage was met with brutal reviews. Comeback projects never came to fruition.
A fire at Fox’s Fort Lee studios destroyed countless films including almost everything Theda ever acted in.
Bara and Brabin lived the rest of their lives alternately in Nova Scotia, Los Angeles, and her native Cincinnati. They never had children.
She died of cancer in 1955.
ALSO
In 2017, a Hollywood historian made Lost Cleopatra, a 90-minute documentary that recreates Theda Bara’s classic movie using the only surviving clip and hundreds of still photographs taken during filming.
Comments