The film industry is a weird thing. In some ways, not much has changed in the past one hundred years. Yet, at the same time, Hollywood today couldn’t be more different than it was in the 1920s. Some of the best examples of this can be seen within the memory of an Ohioan You Should Know – Theda Bara.
Who Was Theda Bara?
Well, it all depends on who you ask.
According to the film studios, Theda Bara was born at some point around 1892, an Egyptian Beauty born under the shadows of the pyramids to an Italian artist and a French actress. She was an instant success here in America, moving to Hollywood in 1914 where she was instantly put into pictures.
And all that was one huge porky (and everyone knew it was a lie, but it was a good story and so they went with it.)
When the first Hollywood studios formed and began making motion pictures, they wanted to control everything. And I mean everything. Movies were a relatively new phenomenon, and they were bound to shape it into whatever they saw fit. The product, the film, that’s what was important. Not the actors. Not the story. Just … the film.
In fact, in the earliest films, the actors names aren’t even mentioned at all.
This wouldn’t last very long, thanks to two people. The first was Florence Annie Bridgwood, as her parents named her. She was a cute, bright young lady who played a few small roles in films until she got noticed, not by studio executives, but by the people watching the films. It was the general public who named her first, The Biograph Girl (Biograph being the studio who made the films) because nobody knew what her actual name was. The Biograph saw there might be some benefit to having a recognizable actor in their films, so eventually they named her Florence Lawrence, which is how we refer to her today. She’s credited as being the first recognized or named Movie Star, except there’s this French dude, Max Linder, who kind of beat her to the punch. Except, he made French films, so some people say that doesn’t count.
Florence Lawrence did prove to Hollywood that people will go see a film if it has someone they recognized, and before long all the big studios were doing it.
Can We Get Back To Theda Bara Now?
Yes, sorry for the brief history lesson. Sometimes we need to do that so things make sense.
Theda Bara was actually raised Theodosia Burr Goodman in the affluent Jewish neighborhood of Cincinnati, Ohio called Avondale. Her father was a jeweler who hailed from the Jewish side of Poland, her mother, well, she was Swiss. Theda graduated from Walnut Hills High School (Go Eagles!) before studying theater at The University of Cincinnati (Go Bearcats!). She did some theater around town, but nothing all that noteworthy.
She finally got her big break after moving to New York (because that’s where all the aspiring actors went at the time) and getting a role on Broadway, playing the role of Mme. Schleswig for 87 performances of a play called “The Devil” under the name of Theodosia De Cappet. She was noticed on stage, but unfortunately the reaction was “Meh…” and she had a hard time finding stage work after that.
At the time, Fox Studios was headquartered in Fort Lee, New Jersey (just across the river from New York City) so she thought maybe try there. They cast her in a few pictures, usually as some kind of seductress, often scantily clad, or exemplifying exotic beauty.
Eventually she decided that if Fox Studios wasn’t going to let her act, she’d return to stage acting, which she did at the Schubert Theater in a production called The Blue Flame. Once again, she was noticed, but a bit underwhelmed at the level of her success. The audience, it seemed, just loved her. It was the critics who said she couldn’t act.
It was at this point that she decided to move to Hollywood. She had a little luck with Fox Studios, maybe there, with more studios to potentially work for, she just might find her way.
Finally in California, she didn’t have the best of luck. All that changed, however, in 1915 when Frank Powell cast her as The seducer vampire in A Fool There Was. And while she was clearly no Meryl Streep (considering it’d be another thirty-five years before She was born) both audiences and critics just loved her and couldn’t get enough.
It was also at this time that Theda Goodman, Theodosia Goodman, Theodosia De Cappet, and any other name she had ever gone by went out the window and from this time on she was known as Theda Bara.
Sadly, we’re not entirely sure where the name actually came from. Some people say that Frank Powell gave her that name after talking with her. She was able to keep her first name, but her last was changed to Bara because she was related, somehow, to someone named Baranger. Another theory is that the studios were trying to promote her as an exotic, arab beauty, and that her name was an amalgam of the words “Arab Death” which did seem to describe the roles she was playing.
Now in Hollywood, Theda Bara began making movies like she had always dreamed of, and the studios were starting to promote her as the next “It Girl” even if she was an “evil It girl” and all that, nothing like the wholesome girl-next-door types that had their names associated with films.
Wherever the name came from … it stuck.
Theda Made It Big
Back in Ohio, Theda Bara’s family is finally proud of her. When she had left Cincinnati heading to New York, her father was less than thrilled. He wanted to support his daughter and her dreams of becoming an actor, but I think he also was aware that any stardom was a long way off for her. (Perhaps he’d seen her in some of the plays she had done in Cincinnati and wanted to steer her toward her Plan B, not that she really had one.)
But, after seeing her in A Fool There Was, and seeing how Theda Bara was now becoming a known name – the Goodwin family changed their surname to Bara.
(In my mind, Daddy had a hard time convincing anyone that Theda Bara was Bernard Goodman’s daughter, but Bernard Bara’s daughter was easier. But who knows if that’s the case.)
For Theda, success wasn’t exactly what she thought it was going to be. She was fulfilling her dream of being an actor, and she clearly enjoyed all the attention and notoriety that went along with that – but there was still something missing. In her own mind, even through she was now a famous film star, and well on her way to becoming Hollywood Royalty, she didn’t feel like she was really acting.
In every film she made, she played the same sort of character: The Vamp. A woman seducer tempting some fella into a world of exotic fantasy or debauchery or what not. Damnit, she wanted to be an actress. She wanted to play different characters, do different things on screen.
In 1916, the studios allowed her try something different when they cast her in the film version of one of Shakespeare’s most famous plays, playing Juliet in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. (Just kidding, it was Romeo and Juliet). Lots of people went to see the film, so it was a commercial success for the studio … but the audiences at the time weren’t as impressed and everyone, it seemed, wanted her to go back and do the Vamp thing again. They just loved that whole Vamp thing.
So, Theda went back to being The Vamp. However, there were a few films where her exotic beauty may have worked to her advantage. These include films like Cleopatra in 1917 and the following year’s Salome.
In 1921 Bara married film director and producer Charles Brabin. Apparently, Charles loved that Theda was an actress, however he was a bit traditional in his thinking that wives should stay at home and keep house rather than be employed.
Not working in the industry did not remove Theda Bara from the social spotlight, however, as being married to a director and producer meant being invited to all the posh parties and hosting glamorous dinner parties in their home. Theda often commented that she would be returning to screens soon, but that would not happen for quite some time.
She would, however, go on to make two more films, The Unchastened Woman in 2025 and Madame Mystery the following year.
After this, Theda Bara retired, this time for good.
The Legacy of Theda Bara
It is hard to deny that Theda Bara finally left her mark on Hollywood and the Entertainment Industry.
Even though she is considered to be the first Hollywood sex symbol, one of the first actors to have name recognition, and was so highly publicized by the studios that she worked with, she was said to have been paid over $4,000 a week while working. (That’s over $70,000 in today’s terms.)
Throughout her years in Hollywood, she did face more criticisms than just her acting ability (or the lack of one).
For example, when she was cast in 1919’s Kathleen Mavourneen, she was already starting to get tired of Fox Studios, and it seems they were starting to tire of her as well. She was often seen arguing with Fox producers, and a couple people later would comment about the stress this left on the set.
When the film finally came out … nobody liked it. Fox blamed Theda. Theda blamed Fox. And the two parties agreed to go their separate ways. But that was not the end of the story. The movie was said to be so bad that audiences complained to anyone and everyone they could.
There was also one group that absolutely hated it – The Irish Hibernian societies (Irish Catholics) absolutely hated that an Irish Lass (in a role that would have been perfect for another star like Mary Pickford) was played by a Jewish woman. This sin was, to them, unforgivable. Irishmen would eventually be found throwing rocks at the theaters and setting off stink-bombs shortly before the films showtimes.
Even though most of the actors from the Silent Film era would go on to do at least one of the new “talkies”, Theda Bara was not one of them. In fact, not a single recording of her voice is believed to exist.
The Loss of Theda Bara
It is, unfortunately, impossible to know just how many movies Theda Bara made, but the current total is somewhere around fifty, although the number is most likely quite a bit higher since that total does not include the movies she was in before actors had their names attached to the films they were in.
Of those, sadly, only a few remain.
In 1937, a massive fire broke out at the Fox Studio warehouse and as a result many motion pictures from the silent era were completely destroyed. Theda herself kept copies of many of her movies in storage, but due to improper storage (she probably didn’t know any better) she discovered that those prints had degraded from the nitrite when she tired to show them to a friend in the 1940s.
Sadly, even some of the prints of films that were not destroyed in the fire have become lost, as well for other reasons. For example, the last known person to have seen her version of Cleopatra was Cecil B. Demille who viewed it shortly before filming his own version (1934 with Claudette Colbert in the titular role) but we’re certain he returned it in pristine condition, right?
Only about a minute’s worth of Cleopatra still exists today, and roughly twice that for Salome. The only complete films believed to still exist are A Fool There Was (1915), East Lynne (1916), and The Unchastened Woman (2025). Two later short films, Madam Mystery and 45 Minutes From Hollywood also still exist.
In Retrospect, Theda Bara was probably just as mysterious as the characters she portrayed on screen. It is hard to know, for certain, whether or not she felt she had lived up to her dreams, if her accomplishments were ever enough for her.
Theda Bara lived in a time when not only did the studios control what information was released about their actors, but also as they quite often did, they got to make up whatever they wanted. Today, that may seem absurd (but believe me this process still goes on today, even though it’s a bit rougher with cameras everywhere and fans who can fact check the slightest details on the internet). But, at the time, it seemed to do well for the industry.
This might have been Theda Bara’s problem with Hollywood.
Even though audiences knew the stories they were seeing were often fiction (or, non-fiction stories that happened to other people) they didn’t quite grasp the concept of “acting”. Most believed that these actors were playing themselves, more or less. If they had to choose between an affluent Jewish girl from Cincinnati and a mysterious daughter of an Arab-Swiss arrangement, they would chose the latter every time, hands down.
Today, many actors try to fend off such typecasting to varying success. But, I have to wonder what it was like when the general public actually thought you were the characters you played on film?
So, for Theda, did everyone love her? Or, did they love someone else they thought was her, just because they saw her on screen. Were her accomplishments really hers, or did they belong to the characters she played. Perhaps that’s why she tried so hard to get out from under the Vamp persona. Maybe she wanted the world to know that she was much more than … just that.
