Theda Bara

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 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 was born Theodosia Burr Goodman on July 29, 1885, in Cincinnati, Ohio.

She was named after the daughter of U.S. Vice President Aaron Burr.

Theda had two younger siblings: Marque (1888–1954) and Esther (1897–1965), who went by the nickname "Lori".

In 1890 the family moved to Avondale, a Cincinnati suburb with a substantial Jewish community.

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.

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.

Bara made more than 40 films between 1914 and 1926, but most are now lost, having been destroyed in the 1937 Fox vault fire.

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.

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 complete prints of Cleopatra are known to exist today, but numerous photographs of Bara in costume as Cleopatra have survived.

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.

Bara was known for wearing very revealing costumes in her films.

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.

After her marriage to Charles Brabin in 1921, she made two more films and then retired from acting in 1926; she never appeared in a sound film.

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.

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.

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.

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.)