Theda Bara

• Born: July 20, c. 1885
• Birthplace: Cincinnati, Ohio
• Died: April 13, 1955
• Place of death: Los Angeles, California

Actor

Bara was one of the first majorsilent film actors to portray a “vamp,” a ruthless woman, which was a departure from the virginal heroine types played by other female stars in the 1910’s.

Early Life

Theda Bara (THEE-duh BA-ruh) was born Theodosia Burr Goodman, most probably in 1885, to immigrant parents, Bernard and Pauline, in Cincinnati, Ohio. Without a confirming birth certificate, her birth year is commonly assumed from the year of her high school graduation in 1903. She had a younger sister and brother. Called Theda or Teddy within the family, she grew to slightly above average height for those days, with an inclination toward plumpness. Her outstanding features were her strikingly large and intense dark eyes. She is said to have attended the University of Cincinnati for two years before going to New York to pursue a career in the theater.

Life’s Work

Given the fevered publicity during her career as a silent film star, Bara’s activities during the ten years that preceded are not known with certainty. Apparently she played minor roles on Broadway and in touring companies under the name of Theodosia de Coppet. What is clear is that she never became a star performer. At some point she met movie director Frank Powell, who cast her as an extra in a 1914 film. He was preparing a motion picture at the Fox studio called A Fool There Was, based on a play and a poem by Rudyard Kipling. With practically no film experience, Bara was cast in a star role as Gilda the home-wrecker. Her dark eyes accentuated with black kohl, she slunk through the film, destroying the lives of all those with whom she made contact. To a public used to petite blonde heroines, Bara was a sensation.

Her role as the vampire—not a bloodsucker but a cold seductress of men—resulted in the word “vamp” becoming part of the American lexicon. In addition, entering film immortality and much parodied was her famous line, “Kiss me, my fool.” The studio’s public relations department made Bara the first actor to be turned into a major star through sustained publicity. It claimed that Bara had been born in Egypt within the shadow of the Sphinx to a French actor and an Italian sculptor. Her name was supposedly an anagram for “Arab death.” Her contract specified that she was not to appear in public unless heavily veiled and she was not to marry. The Jewish girl from Ohio was metamorphosed into an international woman of mystery.

Bara did not always portray “vamp” roles, but those were the most popular with the public and the most publicized by Fox. Their titles told the audience all they needed to know: Sin (1915), The Devil’s Daughter (1915), Destruction (1915), The Tiger Woman (1917), The Vixen (1916), The Rose of Blood (1917), Gold and the Woman (1916), The Serpent (1916). With Carmen in 1915, she began a series of classic roles that were to include Romeo and Juliet (1916), Madame DuBarry (1917), Salome (1918), Camille (1917), and, her most famous, 1917’s epic Cleopatra. For that film she relocated to California and remained there. She also essayed old stage melodramas such as The Two Orphans (1915), East Lynne (1916), Lady Audley’s Secret (1916), and Under Two Flags (1916). Bara’s few attempts at sympathetic roles were not greeted with enthusiasm either by moviegoers or by critics.

By 1918 Bara’s films had become less popular. There were real horrors emanating from the Great War, and her evil ways seemed tame by comparison. By 1919 she was making four thousand dollars a week and demanding a raise to five thousand dollars, but her films were collecting less and less money. Her attempt at another nonvamp film, Kathleen Mavourneen (1919), was a failure, and there were protests by Irish Americans about her playing the famous fictional Irish lass. When Fox did not renew her contract, the reign of the screen’s premier vamp ended. In 1920, a promoter cast her in a Broadway play, the melodrama The Blue Flame. The critics all but laughed her off the stage in New York, but a curious public supported the play on tour. A year later she and Englishman Charles Brabin, who had directed her in Kathleen Mavourneen, were wed.

Bara accepted an offer from the small Chadwick Studio in 1925 to appear in The Unchastened Woman. Her acting style had not evolved and her floridly theatrical gestures seemed fatally old-fashioned in the midst of the Jazz Age. She then agreed to star in Hal Roach comedy shorts, but the only one completed was Madame Mystery in 1926, which spoofed her persona. Wealthy from the high salary she had made, Bara was a popular Beverly Hills socialite who only occasionally entered the limelight. There was a short local run of a play in the mid-1930’s and a few radio broadcasts. These revealed that Bara had exchanged her Midwestern speech patterns for a posh English accent.

Of the more than forty films in which Bara starred, only four are known to exist today. A fire in the vaults of Fox in the mid-1930’s destroyed whatever negatives of her films still existed. Only a small number of major silent stars have so few films remaining for appraisal by modern audiences and historians. The pictures she made in her prime, notably Cleopatra, are among the most sought after “lost” films. What remains are the multitudes of stills and publicity photographs, most of which show Bara in her vamp mode. Only a legendary name is left to memorialize an important starring career. A well-reviewed musical, Theda Bara and the Frontier Rabbi, played Off-Broadway in 1993. Bara died of stomach cancer in Los Angeles in 1955.

Significance

The vampire character played by Bara worked its way into the American stereotype. She was the first major Jewish cinema star, although this was never publicized until later in her career. Then, the contrast between her non-Jewish public image (she sometimes wore a cross in character onscreen) and her private life as a devoted Jewish daughter was mentioned occasionally. The publicity campaign launched to sell her as a femme fatale was the largest and most spectacular (and in some ways the most absurd) ever attempted until that time and for many years thereafter. The more naïve segments of the public bought the hype and believed her to be what she portrayed on the screen. During World War I, she used her star power to raise a considerable amount of money for war bonds. Her name still resonates as one of the memorable silent stars and a documentary about her, The Woman with the Hungry Eyes,was produced in 2006.

Bibliography

Bodeen, De Witt. From Hollywood: The Careers of Fifteen Great American Stars. South Brunswick, N.J.: A. S. Barnes, 1976. All the performers are from the silent screen days, including Bara.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. “Theda Bara.” Films in Review, May, 1968. A magazine article with a brief biography and synopses of Bara’s films.

Genini, Ronald. Theda Bara: A Biography of the Silent Screen Vamp, with a Filmography. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1996. A fairly brief biography that does not reveal much new information.

Golden, Eve. Vamp: The Rise and Fall of Theda Bara. Vestal, N.Y.: Emprise, 1996. A brief biography that recites the facts of Bara’s life.

Zierold, Norman. Sex Goddesses of the Silent Screen. Chicago: Regnery, 1973. Bara is one of several actors featured in profile.