Theda Bara

Theda Bara (born Theodosia Burr Goodman) was born on July 29, 1885 in the Avondale section of Cincinnati, Ohio to her father Bernard Goodman, a prosperous Jewish tailor, and her mother Pauline Louise, whom was also Jewish. They were married in 1882. Theda had a brother and a sister: her brother's name was Marque and her sister's name was Esther (she was also an actress and her stage name was Lori Bara).

In her childhood, Theda Bara didn't do much but read. But while attending Walnut Hills High School, Bara began to get interested in acting. In fact, she participated in her school drama club.

After graduating from high school, she attended the University of Cincinnati. After two years of college, she dropped out and moved to New York to peruse an acting career on the stage. After a decade of small parts (though records are scarce), Bara was very unsuccessful.

Theodosia's luck changed when she met film director Frank Powell and he asked her to play as an extra in the film The Stain (1914). His intention was to hire her for his next moving picture. When she showed that she could take direction well, she was hired to be in the leading role in the movie A Fool There Was (1915). She was signed onto contract with the first name Theda, a childhood nickname and her last name Bara, from the family name Baranger.

After the successes of A Fool There Was, Theda became one of the most famous silent film stars, behind the likes of Charlie Chaplin and Mary Pickford.

Her best known role in the film industry was being "the vamp" or the "the vampire".

"The Vamp" was a seductive woman who uses her sensuality to exploit men. Theda tried not to be typecasted by this role in film and tried to with the two films Under Two Flags and Her Double Life and Romeo and Juliet.

Most of Theda's films were shot on the East Coast where she lived with her mother and her siblings.

Since Hollywood became the center of film making, Theda had to relocate to Los Angeles to film the epic Cleopatra (1917). This was one of Bara's biggest films.

Sadly enough, no prints of Cleopatra exist today but many
pictures survive of her in her Queen of the Nile costume.

By 1919, Theda became tired of
her type casted role as "the vamp"
and made her last film with Fox
called The Lure of Ambition.
Her film career slowed down
after she got married to the
British-born American film director
Charles Brabin.

As she grew closer and closer to
Brabin, Theda was told by her
husband to retire from the
entertainment industry and to
devote the rest of her life to
"the home".

Before quitting her film career,
she made one last movie that
was called Madame Mystery
(1926). *
Seeing as Theda Bara was a silent movie star,
she never was recorded in sound so, we'll never
know what she will sound like.

Another fall back in getting to know Theda more
is that in1937, a fire started at Fox studios and
destroyed all of her films except for three full films.
Her last Broadway performance was in the play
Blue Flame in 1927. Theda spent the rest of her
life as a hostess in Hollywood and New York, in
comfort and in wealth.

Theda Bara died of stomach cancer in
1955 in Los Angeles, CA, and was interred
as Theda Bara Barbin in the Forest Lawn
Memorial Park Cemetery in Glendale, CA.
Her death certificate incorrectly listed her
birthday as "July 22, 1892".

Biography
~by Justin Dowdy

I have the
face of a
vampire,
but the heart
of a feminist.

~Theda Bara

carefully researched...
unravels the fascinating trajectory of this cinematic
vamp....
A useful volume in silent American film

~ Choice

revealing the real woman behind the dark persona

~ Filmfax

During the rest of my screen career,
I am going to continue doing vampires
as long as people sin. For I believe that
humanity needs the moral lesson and it
needs it in repeatedly larger doses.

~Theda Bara, 1917

The reason good women
like me and flock to
my pictures is that there
is a little bit of vampire
instinct in every woman.

~Theda Bara

To understand those days,
you must consider that
people believed what they
saw on the screen....

Audiences thought the stars
were the way they saw them.

Why, women kicked my
photographs as they went into
the theaters where my pictures
were playing, and once on the
streets of New York a woman
called the police because her
child spoke to me.

~Theda Bara