July 29: Theda Bara

Theda Bara (Theodosia Burr Goodman), one of the film industry’s first sex stars, was born in Cincinnati on this date in 1890. Bara made more than 40 silent films between 1914 and 1926, and their popularity enabled her producer, William Fox, to found the Fox Film Corporation, with a studio in Fort Lee, New Jersey. A fire at that studio would ultimately destroy the prints of all but six of her films. Bara made her reputation as a “vamp” (short for vampire) and was unable to escape the typecasting to expand her career. Her publicists billed her as an “exotic,” supposedly the daughter of an Arab sheik and a French actress; in fact, her father was a Jewish tailor from Poland and her mother a Swiss Jew, and Bara lived with them in New York during her early career. She wore highly revealing outfits in her films, the likes of which would be banned in 1930 by the Hollywood Production Code. “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 Watch a clip of Theda Bara in the 1917 Cleopatra and listen to an interview with her: Updated, 30 July: Typo corrected.