Theda Bara ( ;Archived at Ghostarchive and the Wayback Machine: 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.
Born to a Jewish family in Cincinnati, Bara was the biggest star of Fox Studios, which concocted a fictitious persona for her as an Egyptian-born woman interested in the occult. She made 43 films between 1914 and 1926. Three of her films were for Pathe, one was for Chadwick Pictures, and 39 were for Fox; most of these were lost in the 1937 Fox vault fire.
After leaving Fox in 1919, Bara was unable to recapture her previous success. Following a marriage to Charles Brabin in 1921, she made three more films before retiring from acting in 1926. Bara never appeared in any sound films.
Early life Bara was born Theodosia Burr Goodman on July 29, 1885, in Cincinnati, Ohio. She was named after Theodosia Burr Alston, the daughter of U.S. Vice President Aaron Burr. Her father was Bernard Goodman (1853–1936), Alt URL 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 worked as an actress and writer as Lori Bara.
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.
Career Most of Bara's early films were shot along the East Coast, where the film industry was then based, primarily at Fox Studios in Fort Lee, New Jersey. She lived with her family in New York City. The rise of Hollywood as the center of the American film industry forced her to move to Los Angeles to film the epic Cleopatra (1917), which became one of her biggest hits. Only a one-minute fragment of Cleopatra is known to exist today, but numerous photographs of her in costume as Cleopatra have survived.
Bara was Fox's biggest star between 1915 and 1919, but she allowed her five-year contract with the company to expire upon tiring of being typecast. 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. Her fame drew large crowds to the theater, but her acting was savaged by critics.
Her career suffered after leaving Fox, and she did not make another film until The Unchastened Woman (1925) for Chadwick Pictures. She retired after making only two more films, the short comedies Madame Mystery (1926) and 45 Minutes from Hollywood (1926) directed by Stan Laurel for Hal Roach; in the latter, 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.
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". Film review. In 1917, the Goodman family legally changed its surname to Bara.
Persona Bara was known for wearing very revealing costumes in her films. Promoting an actress as mysterious, with an exotic background, was popular at that time. 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 under the shadow of the Great Sphinx of Giza and 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, and later purchased a property in Harbourville, Nova Scotia, overlooking the Bay of Fundy, where they built a summer home they called Baranook. They had no children. Bara also owned and often enjoyed extended stays in a villa-style home in Cincinnati. The villa was later acquired by Xavier University, which used the house as a residence for nuns and then as the "honors villa" for students. The house was demolished 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, Skip to 50m:50s. 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 cremated at Chapel of the Pines Crematory (disputed), and her remains were inurned under the name Theda Bara Brabin in the Great Mausoleum at Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery in Glendale, California. Bara bequeathed $100,000 to her sister, $8,000 to her husband, and $1,000 to her sister-in-law.
Legacy Bara often is cited as the first film sex symbol.
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, and is shown in the film MaXXXine.
Bara never appeared in a sound film. The 1937 Fox vault fire destroyed most of the studio's films made before 1930; Bara made 43 films in total between 1914 and 1926, but complete prints of only six still exist. Five are partially lost and 32 are completely lost. The six films that survive are The Stain (1914), A Fool There Was (1915), East Lynne (1916), The Unchastened Woman (1925), Madame Mystery (1926), and 45 minutes from Hollywood (1926). The five films that survive in fragments are Cleopatra (1917) (1 minute worth of fragments), The Soul of Buddha (1918) (23 seconds worth of fragments), Salome (1918) (2 minutes worth of fragments), When a Woman Sins (1918) (23 seconds worth of fragments), and Lure of Ambition (1919) (43 seconds worth of fragments). Most of the clips can be seen in documentaries such as Theda Bara et William Fox (2001) and The Woman with the Hungry Eyes (2006). Additional footage has been found which shows her behind the scenes on a picture.
Some of her films and fragments of her films were rediscovered. The Stain (1914), Bara's only feature for Pathe, was rediscovered in the 1990s. A complete print of East Lynne (1916) was found in 1971; 23 seconds worth of surviving footage from When a Woman Sins was found in 2019, and were 43 seconds worth of surviving footage from Lure of Ambition (1919). Two minutes of surviving footage from Salome was discovered in 2021 by an intern at Filmoteca Española.Archived at Ghostarchive and the Wayback Machine: In 2023, 40 seconds of additional footage from Cleopatra were found in a toy projector purchased on eBay by film researcher James Fennell. In 2025, a 23-second fragment of The Soul of Buddha was discovered in the documentary Theda Bara et William Fox (2001).
Critics stated that her portrayal of calculating, cold-hearted women was morally instructive to men. Bara responded, "I will continue doing vampires as long as people sin."
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 Extant Credited as Theodosia Goodman, presumed lost until a copy was found in the 1990s 1915 A Fool There Was The VampireExtant1915 The Kreutzer Sonata Celia FriedlanderLost film1915 The Clemenceau Case IzaLost film1915 The Devil's Daughter Gioconda DiantiLost film1915 Lady Audley's Secret Helen TalboysLost film1915 The Two Orphans HenrietteLost film1915 Sin RosaLost film1915 Carmen CarmenLost film1915 The Galley Slave Francesca BrabautLost film1915 Destruction FernadeLost film 1916 The Serpent Vania LazarLost film1916 Gold and the Woman Theresa DecordovaLost film1916 The Eternal Sapho Laura BruffinsLost film1916 East Lynne Lady Isabel Carlisle Extant Presumed lost until a copy was discovered in 1971.1916 Under Two Flags CigaretteLost film1916 Her Double Life Mary DooneLost film1916 Romeo and Juliet JulietLost film1916 The Vixen Elsie DrummondLost film 1917 The Darling of Paris EsmeraldaLost film1917 The Tiger Woman Princess PetrovitchLost film1917 Her Greatest Love HazelLost film1917 Heart and Soul JessLost film1917 Camille Marguerite GauthierLost film1917 Cleopatra Cleopatra 1 minute survives 1917 The Rose of Blood Lisza TapenkaLost film1917 Madame Du Barry Jeanne VaubernierLost film 1918 The Forbidden Path Mary LyndeLost film1918 The Soul of Buddha Priestess A 23-second clip survives from the documentary Theda Bara et William Fox (2001). 1918 Under the Yoke Maria ValverdaLost film1918 Salomé Salome 2 minutes survive1918 When a Woman Sins Lilian Marchard / Poppea 23 seconds survive1918 The She-Devil LoletteLost film 1919 The Light Blanchette Dumond, aka Madame LefresneLost film1919 When Men Desire Marie LohrLost film1919 The Siren's Song Marie BernaisLost film1919 A Woman There Was Princess ZaraLost film1919 Kathleen Mavourneen Kathleen CavanaghLost film1919 La Belle Russe Fleurett Sackton/La Belle RusseLost film1919 The Lure of Ambition Olga Dolan43 seconds survive 1925 The Unchastened Woman Caroline KnollysExtant 1926 Madame Mystery Madame MysterieuxExtant Short film1926 45 Minutes from Hollywood HerselfExtant Short film
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.Performance of Silhouettes from the Screen by Steve Norquist