In April 1955, a modest funeral was held in Los Angeles for a woman buried under the name Theodosia Brabin. Only a few mourners gathered to remember her, and the simple crypt bore no trace of the name that had once scandalized a nation: Theda Bara. Thirty-five years earlier, she had been Hollywood’s first sex symbol, a vampire who seduced men on screen and terrified them off it, a star so notorious that a murder defendant once tried to blame his crime on her influence. By the time she died, nearly all evidence of her glory had literally gone up in flames, and she had long since retreated into a quiet domestic life.
The story of how a bookish Jewish girl from Ohio became the wickedest woman in the world is one of the strangest and most ironic tales of early Hollywood. She was not born under the shadow of the Sphinx, as her studio later claimed, but as Theodosia Burr Goodman on July 29, 1885, in a comfortable middle-class suburb of Cincinnati. Her father was a Polish-born Jewish tailor and her mother a Swiss immigrant. Named after the daughter of Vice President Aaron Burr, who was lost at sea in 1813, young Theodosia grew up well-behaved but spirited, devouring books and developing an early fascination with theater.
After a brief stint at the University of Cincinnati, she dropped out around 1905 and headed to New York City determined to become an actress. The path was not easy. She spent nearly a decade in provincial theater companies and on the Yiddish stage circuit, adopting the stage name Theodosia de Coppet to mask her Jewish surname. Work was sparse and unglamorous.
Casting directors overlooked her because the early 1910s ideal favored willowy, rosy-cheeked ingénues, while her figure was curvy and her darker features were considered old-fashioned. By 1914, she was approaching thirty and was just another struggling actress. Her breakthrough came through a chance encounter with director Frank Powell, who was impressed by the dark intensity she brought to a small role in his film The Stain. When Powell was hired by the fledgling Fox studio to direct a provocative drama called A Fool There Was, he thought of Theodosia.
Fox needed an unknown, someone inexpensive and hungry, to star in the picture, and Powell saw exactly that in her. On the cusp of 1915, she accepted the role that would change her life. Fox’s publicity team immediately realized that Theodosia Goodman needed a more exotic persona. They renamed her Theda Bara, which they touted as an anagram of “Arab death,” and concocted an absurd backstory about her being raised in the Sahara by a French actress mother and a rich Arab sheikh.
In truth, it was pure fabrication, but in an era of playful publicity stunts, it worked. Fox staged an elaborate press conference in a New York hotel suite transformed into a dimly lit, incense-filled Egyptian lair. Costumed as a sultry high priestess, Bara emerged from behind a curtain and recited a seductive monologue about her upbringing among the pyramids. The reporters knew it was nonsense but played along, enchanted by the audacity.
Afterward, Fox’s publicist dismissed everyone except a young female journalist named Louella Parsons. Alone with her, Bara dropped the accent, flung open a window, and gasped for fresh air, revealing herself to be a far more ordinary American than mystical queen. The confession made Parsons a lifelong ally in the press. When A Fool There Was premiered in early 1915, audiences got their first look at the woman soon nicknamed “the vamp.
” The film, based on a Rudyard Kipling poem, told the cautionary tale of a married man ruined by an irresistible femme fatale. Bara played the role credited simply as “the vampire,” and in one scene draped in velvet and fur, she beckoned her prey with an intertitle that became an instant national catchphrase: “Kiss me, my fool. ” For the 1910s, it was scandalous. Respectable women in movies weren’t supposed to enjoy dominating men, yet here was a female character who did exactly that, making wickedness look tantalizing.
The film was a total sensation. Overnight, Theda Bara became the biggest sex symbol in the world, as recognizable as Mary Pickford or Charlie Chaplin. Her name alone could sell out theaters and helped rescue Fox from serious financial debt. It is no exaggeration to say she saved the studio.
Fox kept the mystique going, instructing her to give interviews in character. She spun stories of mystical powers and past lives, claiming to feel the spirit of ancient Egypt within her. “I am Cleopatra,” she told one reporter with theatrical earnestness. “I live Cleopatra.
” The media lapped it up, calling her the devil’s handmaiden and posing her in photographs clutching human skulls. No star had ever been promoted with such gothic flamboyance. Yet behind the scenes, Bara remained level-headed, understanding the rituals required to hold the public’s attention. She played the part off-screen as well, never appearing in public as plain Theodosia Goodman.
Still, the sudden fame took a personal toll. People confused her with her characters. A furious woman once confronted her on the street, calling her a home-wrecker and harlot. Bara snapped back that she was working for her living, and if she were the kind of woman the stranger thought, she wouldn’t have to.
She refused to be shamed, once declaring that the vampire she played was “the vengeance of my sex upon its exploiters. ”
By 1917, Bara was firmly entrenched as Hollywood’s reigning vamp. Fox cast her as history’s most infamous seductresses, including Cleopatra, a lavish epic whose revealing costumes scandalized censors and thrilled audiences. In one scene she appeared wearing little more than a jeweled metal bra of coiled serpents, and promotional stills showed her posing topless except for the snake bra.
Religious groups howled, some cities banned the film, and the controversy only fueled public curiosity. Cleopatra became one of the most popular films of the year. At the peak of her fame in 1918, she was reportedly the third most popular movie star in America. With fame came infamy.
Some in the public genuinely feared her. Restaurants refused to serve her, and at least once a nurse refused to admit her husband to a hospital on the bizarre assumption that her presence meant something immoral was afoot. Life imitated art in unsettling ways in 1918, when a man on trial in Los Angeles for murdering his wife by throwing her out of a window mounted an outrageous defense. He claimed his late wife had been a vampire who betrayed him and leapt to her death from a guilty conscience.
The court, in a desperate flourish, subpoenaed Theda Bara to testify as an expert witness on the psychology of female vampires. Reporters packed the gallery to see Hollywood’s wickedest woman take the stand on the side of justice. With poise, she explained that cinematic vampires didn’t literally drink blood but lured foolish men and drained them of honor and money. The jury was unconvinced by the defendant’s ludicrous defense, and he was convicted, but not before cementing Bara’s notoriety even further.
Despite the whirlwind of fame, Bara began to feel confined by her shadowy image. She yearned to show another side of her talent. Occasionally Fox let her try more wholesome roles, including a version of Romeo and Juliet in which the most famous vamp played Shakespeare’s innocent Juliet. Reviews were polite, but audiences missed her in a darker mode.
Still, she persisted. In 1919 she seized on a project called Kathleen Mavourneen, a popular old Irish romantic drama, as her chance to play a pure-hearted heroine. Filming proved personally rewarding when she fell in love with the film’s young British director, Charles Brabin. Early reviews were positive, and it seemed she might successfully transition from vamp to virgin.
She was wrong. When Kathleen Mavourneen opened, it met a firestorm of controversy from Irish-American groups furious on two counts. They objected to the film’s depiction of poverty in Ireland, and many were incensed that a Jewish actress had been cast as Ireland’s beloved fictional daughter. Anti-Semitic sentiment boiled over.
Protesters disrupted screenings, riots broke out in theaters, and demonstrators rolled stink bombs down the aisles. Bara received death threats for daring to portray Kathleen. For a woman who had spent years hiding her Jewish identity behind exotic aliases, it was a cruel twist that her real background became front-page news twisted into public ire. The film tanked, Fox quietly declined to renew her contract when it expired in 1919, and after four years as their top star, she was cut loose at age thirty-four.
In the wake of her career’s collapse, Bara found solace in her romance with Brabin. They married in 1921, and the outspoken feminist surprised friends by embracing domestic life, retiring partly because she was over the Hollywood grind and partly because her conservative husband didn’t love her working. A few last attempts at the spotlight failed. A 1925 Broadway play called The Blue Flame drew harsh reviews, and her final screen appearance came in 1926 in a comedy short that poked fun at her own vamp image.
Then she truly left the sound stage behind. By all accounts, she slid gracefully into the role of a society hostess, throwing elegant dinner parties attended by luminaries like Mary Pickford. She had made a fortune at her peak, earning four thousand dollars a week, and lived comfortably. When the couple sold their mansion, the buyer was Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle, who insisted her boudoir be left exactly as she had decorated it and created a shrine to the vamp in his new home.
Even in absence, she inspired fascination. Theda Bara lived out her later years contentedly, happily married until the end. In interviews, she defended the exaggerated gestures of silent acting as necessary to convey emotion without words. She was quietly proud of pioneering a visual language of feeling.
Sadly, of the more than forty movies she made in her heyday, only a scant few remain. In 1937, a vault fire at Fox’s New Jersey storage facility destroyed most of their silent film archive, including nearly all of her films. Cleopatra, Salome, Camille, and countless others turned to ashes in an afternoon inferno. Today, essentially only one of her star vehicles survives in full: A Fool There Was, the film that birthed the vamp.
She passed away on April 7, 1955, at age sixty-nine from stomach cancer. Her funeral was modest, and the epitaph on her niche reads Theodosia Brabin, not Theda Bara, reflecting the real identity of a woman who had lived two very different lives. Though she is a ghostly figure in film history, her legacy endures. She was Hollywood’s first bombshell, a prototype for every femme fatale and sex symbol to follow.
A nice Jewish girl from Ohio transformed with the studio’s help into a lethal Egyptian enchantress, conquered Hollywood, scandalized a nation, and watched that fame vanish like a silent movie fade-out. She burned bright and brief across the silent era sky, but her glow never entirely faded.