Back in the silent era, women were either vamps or ingenues. The original vamp in the silent era was Theda Bara who was extremelyfamous for playing dark, brooding and sexy characters who didn't mind going without a bra. The public didn't mind either! That's why Theda is the focus of this week's Throwback Thursday.
As one of the first sex symbols that Hollywood ever produced, Theda - who was born Theodosia Burr Goodman - leaned into her mysterious looks by creating a backstory that added to her sexy mystique. She said her name was an anagram for "Arab Death" and that she was raised in Egypt by actors in the shadow of the Sphynx when she wasactually just a quiet Jewish girl from Ohio. This made her one of the first stars to invent an origin story and embrace celebrity.
During 1914-1919, she was a major star but she couldn't cut it in the talking era of film.Her first break was in The Stain at age 29 - lying that she was 24 and that she had a lot of acting experience - in order to secure this first role. She knew how to tell a tale to get what she wanted. After that, she played skinful roles from vampires to seductresses, all while flaunting her curvaceous figure.
She famously wore very scandalous clothing in the film Cleopatra which were basically a series of pasties. While she never fully stripped, she wore several costumes that were straight up see-through or that only covered the nipples on Bara's small boobies. A lot of her films are missing which is why so many sexy still shots of her are from the highly publicized Cleopatra, but we still feel like we see plenty of Theda in her seductive costumes.
Theda fell out of favor because she was typecast as a kind of character thatmovies stopped using as frequently with the advent of sound and more complicated storytelling. She never once appeared in a sound film and many of her movies are lost, but her legacy as a vixen lives on. She's the original bad girl, the original dark queen of the screen and we continue to pray for more of her sexy films to be rediscovered.
