In article <57c38313$0$57911$c3e8da3$c8b7d2e6@news.astraweb.com>, Robin Hood
says...
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more at
https://thehairpin.com/scandals-of-classic-hollywood-the-most-wicked-face-of-theda-bara-2aa85ce1a79f#.u1gy4dv50
Theodosia Goodman grew up in Cincinnati, the child of middle-class Jewish
immigrants. Her father was a tailor; her mother kept house. She went to high
school, she went to two years of college. She was a middling actress with
middling looks, age 30, stuck in the Yiddish theater circuit, with a bit role in
of women working toward the same end.
And then, in 1915, totally out of nowhere, she became THE BIGGEST SEX SYMBOL IN
THE WORLD. As the star of A Fool There Was, she embodied the cinematic
ways, sucks him dry, and leaves him for ruin. Her name was no longer Theodosia
Her mother was a French actress, her father was an Italian sculptor, yet she had
with dark spirits. She had been reincarnated several times and lunched on
an alluring, vampish creature, occupying the liminal space between this world
and the next. Put differently, Bara was the most blatantly absurd and exquisite
public and on the screen. And like all star images, its potency, and its
effectively over, and today, only one of her major films remains intact. But for
a brief moment in cinematic history, her image functioned as a volatile conduit
and evil, and in an era still governed by rigid codes of moral, spiritual, and
social behavior, it was absolutely irresistible.
just give Bara a new name or a new ethnicity, it made her a creature of the
underworld. Sure, part of this was just good, old-fashioned publicity
playfulness, with the majority of the American public in on the joke. But part
large-scale desire to look at otherness while simultaneously disavowing it in
most reality television.
different manifestations, to the present day. And while Bara was neither the
next time you see nipple tassels.
working as an actress in New York for some time, and at 30 years old, was
reason that she and others shaved five years off her age. As Fox prepared to
cast A Fool There Was, director Frank Powell suggested Bara, who was then going
extra in The Stain (1914) has been the matter of intense fan debate but
ultimately matters little. There she was, there he was; henceforth, there Theda
Bara was.
Of course, Powell and Fox had a financial impetus for casting an unknown: Over
and, as such, could and did demand higher and higher salaries. Fox was
casting an unknown, it made a wager: Maybe the name behind the film was nothing,
but then again, maybe the role of the man-eating vamp would make anyone who
values.
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As the saying goes "The more things change, the more they stay the same.".
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