Theodosia Burr (Goodman) Brabin (1885 - 1955)

Born 29 Jul 1885 in Cincinnati, Hamilton, Ohio, United States

Died 7 Apr 1955 at age 69 in Los Angeles, Los Angeles, California, United States

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Biography

American silent film and stage actress, nicknamed "the Vamp"

Theda Bara (Goodman) Brabin is Notable.

Theda Bara (Goodman) Brabin has Jewish Roots.

Her large black eyes, accentuated by heavy kohl makeup, set off her rounded, dead-white face. Elaborate props such as a tiger-skin rug and a long gold cigarette holder embellished her exoticism, as did her penchant for veils, crowns, large hoop earrings, and bronze bangles. With her long, dark hair and voluptuous figure draped in low-cut gauzy gowns, the vamp perpetuated a familiar stereotype of European passion and exoticism. At the same time, the character created a popular image of women as sensual yet powerful. The vamp dominated and triumphed over men, and contrasted sharply with the clean-cut WASPish characters portrayed by Mary Pickford and Lillian Gish.

Bara scandalized the mores of the middle classes. Meetings held across the country put the burgeoning film industry on trial and focused on Theda Bara—the vampire, the wickedest woman in the world, as she was billed by Fox. Of one film, a critic wrote, “Were the National Board of Censorship possessed of any judgment whatsoever, this is the kind of picture it should place the ban of its disapproval upon.” Local boards issued edicts condemning her films.

But her popularity was unstoppable. In 1915 alone, she starred in eleven pictures. Labeled “Hell’s Handmaiden,” she received two hundred letters a day, including over a thousand marriage proposals. Adoring fans named their babies after her. Her movies ran continuously, sometimes playing six times a day.

She made more than 40 films between 1914 and 1926, but most were lost in the 1937 Fox vault fire. After her marriage to Charles Brabin in 1921, she made two more feature films and then retired from acting in 1926, having never appeared in a sound film.

Born Theodosia Burr Goodman on July 29, 1885 to Bernard Goodman, a Jewish tailor from Chorsel, Poland, and Pauline Louise Françoise de Coppett, who is Swiss of French descent. Theda had two siblings: Marque and Esther, who also became a film actress under the name of Lori Bara. She was named after the daughter of US Vice President Aaron Burr.

Bara attended Walnut Hills High School, graduating in 1903. After attending the University of Cincinnati for two years, she worked mainly in local theater productions, but did explore other projects. After moving to New York City in 1908, she made her Broadway debut in The Devil (1908).

Theda lived with her family in New York City during this time. The rise of Hollywood as the center of the American film industry forced her to relocate to Los Angeles to film the epic Cleopatra (1917), which became one of Bara's biggest hits. No known prints of Cleopatra exist today, but numerous photographs of Bara in costume as the Queen of the Nile have survived.

Between 1915 and 1919, Bara was Fox studio's biggest star, but tired of being typecast as a vamp, she allowed her five-year contract with Fox to expire. Her final Fox film was The Lure of Ambition (1919). In 1920, she turned briefly to the stage, appearing on Broadway in The Blue Flame. Bara's fame drew large crowds to the theater, but her acting was savaged by critics.

Her career suffered without Fox studio's support, and she did not make another film until The Unchastened Woman (1925) for Chadwick Pictures. Bara retired after making only one more film, the short comedy Madame Mystery (1926), made for Hal Roach and directed by Stan Laurel, in which she parodied her vamp image.

At the height of her fame, Bara earned $4,000 per week (the equivalent of over $56,000 per week in 2017 adjusted dollars). Bara's best-known roles were as the "vamp", although she attempted to avoid typecasting by playing wholesome heroines in films such as Under Two Flags and Her Double Life. She appeared as Juliet in a version of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. Although Bara took her craft seriously, she was too successful as an exotic "wanton woman" to develop a more versatile career.

She was known for wearing very revealing costumes in her films. Such outfits were banned from Hollywood films after the Production Code (a.k.a. the Hays Code) started in 1930, and then was more strongly enforced in 1934. It was popular at that time to promote an actress as mysterious, with an exotic background. The studios promoted Bara with a massive publicity campaign, billing her as the Egyptian-born daughter of a French actress and an Italian sculptor. They claimed she had spent her early years in the Sahara desert under the shadow of the Sphinx, then moved to France to become a stage actress. (In fact, Bara had never been to either Egypt or France.) They called her the Serpent of the Nile and encouraged her to discuss mysticism and the occult in interviews. Some film historians point to this as the birth of two Hollywood phenomena: the studio publicity department and the press agent, which would later evolve into the public relations (PR) person.

Theda married British-born American film director Charles Brabin in 1921. They honeymooned at The Pines Hotel in Digby, Nova Scotia, Canada, and later purchased a 400-hectare (990-acre) property down the coast from Digby at Harbourville overlooking the Bay of Fundy, eventually building a summer home they called Baranook. They had no children.

In 1936, she appeared on Lux Radio Theatre during a broadcast version of The Thin Man with William Powell and Myrna Loy. She did not appear in the play but instead announced her plans to make a movie comeback, which never materialized. She appeared on radio again in 1939 as a guest on Texaco Star Theatre. These may be the only recordings of her voice ever made.

In 1994, the US Postal Service issued a stamp in her honor ^[1].

Sources

1. ↑ Smithsonian National Postal Museum https://postalmuseum.si.edu/exhibition/women-on-stamps-part-4-theatre-and-dance-stars-of-the-silent-screen/theda-bara

• Suzanne Wasserman, Jewish Women's Archive https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/bara-theda
• Wikipedia bio https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theda_Bara
• The Sun UK https://www.thesun.co.uk/fabulous/4550226/the-creepy-story-of-theda-bara-hollywoods-first-vampire-actress-who-received-1000-marriage-proposals-and-even-had-fans-kids-named-after-her/
• IMDB https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000847/
• MyHeritage https://www.myheritage.com/research/record-10182-13453/theda-bara-in-biographical-summaries-of-notable-people
• Find A Grave: Memorial #1993
• Theda Bara the Original Vamp https://www.immortalperfumes.com/sweet-tea-apothecary/2019/7/29/behind-the-perfume-theda-bara-the-original-vamp/