Evil Women: Theda Bara

This month, in addition to film review posts, we'll be focusing on a number of actresses who helped to define the idea of a femme fatale, a stock character of a seductive, mysterious, often exotic woman intent on bringing men to their downfalls that has been consistently employed by films over the past century and a half. Join us for the first installment of June's theme: Evil Women.

The first woman we will be profiling is widely recognized as the creator of the vamp, an early (and reasonably problematic for reasons we will soon discuss) form of what would later come to be known as the femme fatale. Theda Bara (1885-1955) was, in many ways, an experiment. Born in Ohio to wealthy Jewish immigrants, Bara would later be Twentieth Century Fox's first manufactured star. Promotors fabricated any and all aspects of her life, personality, family history, heritage, and general existence, determined to create an enduring image of an exotic sexpot, completely un-American and therefore immune to the rigid societal rules of the early-20th century United States. Bara is considered one of the first sex symbols in cinematic history, and although she is not considered a household name today, images of her posing in extravagant costumes and layers of dark makeup continue to endure in the human psyche. Bara's legacy and inspiration can be traced from other silent film stars, like Louise Brooks and Olga Petrova, to future femme fatales, like Gene Tierney and Barbara Stanywick, all the way to contemporary teenagers wearing far too much eyeliner. Indeed, Theda Bara was surely the first goth.

Theda Bara was born Theodosia Burr Goodman in Cincinnati on July 29th, 1885. She was raised in comfortable living circumstances and was able to attend both high school and college, eventually deciding to drop out of the University of Cincinnati to look for acting work. When she was in high school, young Theodosia had been obsessed with film and theatre, and longed to be a star. She didn't actually end up finding success in film until she was in her late twenties, unusual for a star of the day. Her age, of course, was not the only unique thing about her. She also looked very different from other young starlets of the silent era, with wide hips, a full bust, deep set dark eyes, and an exotic appearance.

In 1913, at the age of 29, Bara, who was still going by her first stage name, Theodosia Coppett, was discovered by a film director named Frank Powell. When Powell signed on to Fox, he brought Bara with him. At this time in the film industry, big changes were happening as leading actors began demanding credit for their work (prior to 1910, most actors were only credited as "the girl" or "the man"). As actors and actresses began making a name for themselves (literally), something impossibly monumental occurred: the birth of celebrity.

Theda Bara came to Fox right as the studio was developing a a new protocol for handling its actors and actresses. Prior to 1910, studios and viewers saw actors as simply pawns in the larger game of the film, which at that point was an attraction in itself. By the time Bara came to Fox, the infamous "studio system" was developing, and a large part of this process was the art of transforming actors and actresses into stars. Bara, under the control of Fox, was one of the first American celebrities, given a story, a name, a face, and a career by Frank Powell and the studio executives at her new place of employment.

Although cinema was very young and the idea of celebrity was new, beauty standards were all too prevalent in society for Bara to be toted as the newest female icon. Keep in mind, there was a very strong division existing between "types" of women in the early 20th century. There were good girls, played onscreen by such sweethearts as Lillian Gish and Mary Pickford, and then there were bad girls. The good girl mold was pretty simple- be submissive, childlike, frail, and delicate. The bad girl mold was a little bit more diverse, most certainly the result of the thousands of ways women could defy social norms. Bad girls ran the gamut from women who were hinted to be man-eaters, like Clara Bow, to mysterious, exotic women, like Musidora. Theda Bara was of the second category of bad girls.

Bara was not placed into a bad-girl mold because she was actually a bad girl. In fact, Bara herself was incredibly introverted, quiet, scholarly, party-avoiding and- really- normal. It was only because Bara did not look the part of a sweetheart that Fox decided to turn her into an icon of the occult, a symbol of female empowerment and raw sex appeal all rolled up into a package sprinkled with magic and risqué pre-code allowances, like partial nudity. Fox gave her a fully-furnished apartment, complete with exotic rugs and ethnic details and furniture, and coached her to give interviews to reporters from her "home" in which she spoke in various accents and gave bullshit information about her lineage. Her name was shortened to Theda Bara, which Fox widely announced was an anagram of "Arab Death." She was billed as Egyptian royalty, the daughter of a French actress and an Italian sculptor, with royal lineage. Bara was encouraged to tell reporters about her childhood, supposedly spent in the Sahara Desert under the shade of the Sphinx, and her girlhood introductions to mysticism and occultism. Bara had never been to Egypt, France, or Italy.

Bara and her legacy can be seen in several ways. From a contemporary standpoint it's all too easy to look at a woman who literally posed with skeletons and frequently exploited men and think that she was an amazing feminist icon. Bara- or at least her Fox-designed character- referred to herself as a feminist, and was quoted as telling reporters, "Believe me, for every woman vampire there are ten men of the same type. Men who take everything from women- love, devotion, beauty, youth- and give nothing in return. 'V' stands for 'vampire,' and it stands for 'vengeance,' too. The vampire that I play is the vengeance of my sex upon its exploiters." I mean, is this not the most amazing quote you've ever heard from a woman of the Progressive Era???

It is possible that some free-thinking men and women of the 1910s saw Bara in the way I see her, as a total badass. I would like to think this was the case. But more likely than not, Bara's appeal was a double-edged sword, made to enchant regular Americans with an exoticism and then to scare them into the idea of what might come of female liberation and empowerment. Let's be real, here: a woman claiming to be a feminist who openly claimed to have fluid gender expression and often posed half-naked as foreign women in her films? Basically a man circa 1915's worst nightmare. If anything, Bara's character was created to lure men and women of a certain era in, to enchant them, and, frankly, to scare the shit out of them.

Bara as Cleopatra

Bara was not only a leading sex symbol, despite her dangerous subtext to male and female viewers, but her celebrity was imitated time and time again by other dark-complexioned, occasionally-foreign stars whom studios made into exotic icons. Some stars, like Rudolph Valentino and Ramon Novarro, were actually foreign-born, but studios tended to ignore their actual cultural heritage and use them interchangeably as any race or ethnicity. Undoubtedly, Bara was white. She was not Egyptian, and, although she was Jewish, her father was Polish and her mother was Swiss. Her legacy as a mysterious foreigner of vague cultural lineage would go on to inspire not only Latin Lovers like Valentino and Novarro, but also the likes of Marlene Dietrich and Ingrid Bergman.

Although Bara appeared in over forty films for Fox between 1914 and 1926, only six still exist: The Stain (1914), which was her first film, A Fool There Was (1915), East Lynne (1916), The Unchastened Woman (1925), and two short Hal Roach comedies. Most of Bara's films were lost in the Fox archive fire of 1937. Her most famous and iconic look, that of the Egyptian queen Cleopatra, is from a lost film.

Bara retired from acting in 1926, and never attempted to make the transition into talking motion pictures. Bara made two radio appearances in her life; once in 1936 in a broadcast of The Thin Man with William Powell and Myrna Loy, and once in 1939 as a guest on Texaco Star Theatre. These may be the only existing recordings of her voice. She married a film director named Charles Brabin in 1921, who she lived with for the rest of her life, and never had children. In 1955, at the age of 69, Theda Bara died of stomach cancer at her home in Los Angeles.

Bara's legacy is immense. It's impossible to imagine her existence as a star at any other period, earlier or later than her pre-code sweet spot in the 1910s. Her image- though problematic- remains today as one of the most striking of all cinematic history.