Theda Bara

1885 in Avondale, OH, Bara was raised by her father, Bernard Goodman, a tailor born in Poland, and her mother, Pauline, a wigmaker born in Switzerland. After graduating from Walnut Hills High School, she attended the University of Cincinnati, only to drop out two years later to move to New York in pursuit of an acting career. For nearly a decade, Bara struggled as a stage actress in the city and in touring companies throughout the United States, though she did manage to make her Broadway debut in "The Devil" (1908). Finally, after working as a stock stage actress and film extra, she was discovered by actor-turned-director Frank Powell and became a leading actress with "A Fool There Was" (1915). The melodramatic film - considered overwrought by contemporary standards - featured Bara in her first known vamp role, playing a woman who uses her overt charms to seduce a wealthy stockbroker and in the process rips him apart from his family. Controversial at the time for its risqué elements, particularly Bara's most famous interstitial line, "Kiss me, my fool," the film was an instant hit and turned the previously struggling actress into an overnight sensation.Though not the first screen sex symbol, Bara became the best-known and built the fortunes of her studio, the newly-founded Fox Film Corporation, later to become 20th Century Fox. She continued to play the vamp in titles like "The Vixen" (1916), "The Serpent" (1916), "Gold and the Woman" (1916) and "The Eternal Sappho" (1916). On more than one occasion, however, Bara defied audience expectations by dropping her vamp persona in favor of playing the heroine in films like "Her Double Life" (1916) and "Under Two Flags" (1916). Though she branched out to play Juliet in an early version of "Romeo and Juliet" (1916), it was evident early on that her overly sexualized persona and exotic looks would prevent her from diversifying her career. But Bara still made a number of successful pictures that were filmed on the East Coast, including "The Jungle of Gold" (1917), "The Darling of Paris" (1917), "Rose of Blood" (1917) and "Heart and Soul" (1917). Because the film industry started to thrive in Los Angeles, Bara was forced to relocate to the West Coast to star as the titular lead in "Cleopatra" (1917), one of her most successful films.At the time, "Cleopatra" was the most elaborate film ever made and featured Bara in a number of lavish costumes, many of them risqué even by modern standards. Playing up that angle, Fox promoted Bara as a mysterious actress with an exotic background, claiming that she had grown up in the Sahara Desert and came to Hollywood by way of acting in France - none of which was true, though Bara gamely played along. But in later years, her then-uncontroversial film was suddenly considered obscene once the Production Code took effect in later decades and the film ultimately became lost. Only about 20 seconds of footage survived of Bara's most significant film. Meanwhile, in 1918, Bara was in the midst of her heyday and continued playing the vamp in popular films like "When a Woman Sins" (1918), "Under the Yoke" (1918), and "She Devil" (1918), where she played a fiery Spanish girl who turns thief after failing to woo a painter. By the following year, Bara was earning $4,000 and was bested in popularity only by the likes of Charlie Chaplin and Mary Pickford, but remained unhappy with her studio's reluctance to cast her in non-vamp roles.Of course, Bara attempted to break the mold somewhat with "The Light" (1919), where she played a vamp with a heart of gold. The film was a success, but Bara's tiring of playing the eternal vixen led to tackling other roles that would ultimately derail her career. In the deceptively titled "Siren's Song" (1919), she was the put-upon daughter of a strict lighthouse keeper (Alfred Fremont), and in "Kathleen Mavourneen" (1919), she was a young innocent forced into a loveless marriage. Returning to the vamp roles that she almost single-handedly turned into a craze, Bara was a rather tame social climber in "Lure of Ambition" (1919), the last film she made for Fox. With her contract expired, Bara struggled to find more film roles and attempted to return to the Broadway stage. She would only make two more films, "Unchastened Wife" (1925) and "Madame Mystery" (1926), a Hal Roach comedy in which she parodied her over-the-top man-killing image. Seeing the writing on the wall, Bara retired and became a popular socialite and hostess in Hollywood while enjoying a long, happy marriage to director Charles Brabin, whom she married in 1921. They had no children. Bara died on April 7, 1955 of stomach cancer. She was 69 years old and left behind the legacy of being Hollywood's first true sex symbol.By Shawn Dwyer