Theda Bara

Theodosia Burr Goodman, known professionally as Theda Bara, was born on July 29, 1885, in Cincinnati, Ohio, to Bernard Goodman, a prosperous Jewish tailor originally from Poland, and Pauline Louise Françoise, a Swiss-born woman. She was named after the daughter of U.S. Vice President Aaron Burr. The family relocated in 1890 to Avondale, a Cincinnati suburb with a sizable Jewish community. Bara graduated from Walnut Hills High School in 1903 and spent two years at the University of Cincinnati before pursuing work in local theater. She moved to New York City in 1908 and made her Broadway debut that same year in The Devil.

Bara went on to become one of the most prominent actresses of the silent film era, making 43 films between 1914 and 1926. Thirty-nine of those productions were made for Fox Studios, where she was the studio's biggest star from 1915 to 1919. Fox constructed an elaborate fictitious persona around her, promoting her as an Egyptian-born woman with ties to the occult, the daughter of a French actress and an Italian sculptor who had spent her early years in the Sahara desert. In reality, Bara had never been to Egypt, and her time in France amounted to only a few months. Her femme fatale screen roles earned her the nickname "The Vamp," and her portrayal of seductive, exotic women made her one of cinema's earliest sex symbols. Among her notable films was the epic Cleopatra in 1917, which became one of her biggest commercial successes, though only a one-minute fragment of the film survives today. She also appeared as Juliet in a version of Romeo and Juliet and took on more wholesome roles in films such as Under Two Flags and Her Double Life in attempts to avoid typecasting. At the height of her popularity, she earned $4,000 per week.

Tiring of being typecast, Bara allowed her five-year contract with Fox to expire, with her final film for the studio being The Lure of Ambition in 1919. After leaving Fox, she turned to the stage and appeared on Broadway in 1920 in The Blue Flame. Though her fame drew large audiences to the theater, critics responded harshly to her stage performance. Her Broadway work also included the play The Devil to Pay, and her stage career spanned from 1908 to 1920. Without Fox's promotional machinery behind her, Bara was unable to recapture her earlier level of success. She did not appear in another film until The Unchastened Woman in 1925, produced by Chadwick Pictures. Her final two films were the short comedies Madame Mystery and 45 Minutes from Hollywood, both released in 1926, the latter directed by Stan Laurel for Hal Roach, in which she parodied her own vamp image. Bara never appeared in a sound film.

In 1921, Bara married British-born American film director Charles Brabin. The couple honeymooned at The Pines Hotel in Digby, Nova Scotia, and later purchased a roughly 400-hectare property at Harbourville, Nova Scotia, overlooking the Bay of Fundy, where they eventually built a summer home they called Baranook. They had no children. Bara also owned a villa-style home in Cincinnati, which was later acquired by Xavier University and demolished in July 2011. In 1936, she appeared on a Lux Radio Theatre broadcast of The Thin Man alongside William Powell and Myrna Loy, where she announced plans for a film comeback that never came to fruition. 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 producing a biographical film about her life, with Betty Hutton set to star, but that project also did not materialize.

A 1937 fire at Fox's nitrate film storage vaults in New Jersey destroyed the majority of the studio's pre-1930 productions. Of Bara's 43 films, complete prints of only six survive, five exist in fragments, and 32 are entirely lost. The surviving complete films are The Stain from 1914, A Fool There Was from 1915, East Lynne from 1916, The Unchastened Woman from 1925, Madame Mystery from 1926, and 45 Minutes from Hollywood from 1926. In 1917, the Goodman family legally changed its surname to Bara. For her contributions to the film industry, Bara received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1960, located at 6307 Hollywood Boulevard. She died on April 7, 1955, of stomach cancer at California Lutheran Hospital in Los Angeles. Her remains were inurned under the name Theda Bara Brabin in the Great Mausoleum at Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery in Glendale, California. She was survived by her husband, her mother, and her younger sister, Lori Bara.