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Theda Bara: Arab Death
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Theda Bara was the stage name of Theodosia Burr Goodman (July 29, 1885 – April 13, 1955), an American silent film actress. Movie executives made promotional claims that her stage name was chosen because it is an anagram for "Arab Death." In reality, "Theda" was a childhood nickname for Theodosia. "Bara" was a shortened form of her maternal grandfather's last name, Baranger.
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Did you know that Theda Bara was an anagram for Death Arab, although in reality, Theodosia Goodman was a blond Jewish actress? The word vamp was coined to describe Theda Bara, who "sucked the life from men" in her silent films. Most of which, sadly, no longer exist.
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Hollywood's first and most notorious Vixen, Theda Bara became synonymous with exoticism. She was alluring and unusual, a wide-eyed siren, a gold digger...and eternal Vamp. In fours years (1915 - 1919), Theda vamped her way through 39 films and millions of dollars for Fox Studios. The studio built her up with such a tremendous publicity campaign, that when they pulled the rug out from under her in 1919, her career fell so far, that she was unable to revive it. Pre WW1's film-going audiences were presented with Foxs' version of their starlets mysterious and elusive upbringing by proclaiming she was born of an Italian artist and an Arabian princess and that her first name was an anagram spelling "death" and her last name spelled backwards was Arab. They claimed her mystique was the result of being born in the Sahara desert in the shadow of a sphinx. They further stated her mother left the family to become a well-known actress on the European stage and that Theda was brought up by her multitalented father.
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Although publicized as an Egyptian of royal lineage, silent film actress "Theda Bara" was actually born Theodosia Goodman in Cincinnati, Ohio. Her exotic good looks brought her to the attention of Fox studios in 1914; reasoning that there were too many sweet little ingenues in films of that period, Fox decided to create a worldly "vamp" character, a woman who could destroy men with little more than a sexy glance. The studio changed Theodosia's name to "Theda Bara" (which coincidentally was an anagram for "Arab Death"), casting her in a liberal adaptation of "Rudyard Kipling"'s "A Fool There Was"(1914). She became Fox's biggest star, appearing in as many as ten feature films per year, including "Salome" (1918) and "Cleopatra" (1918).
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From her earliest films, Theda Bara became known for her exotic, seductive, and dangerous characters. Though she experimented with other roles, such as Juliet, in an attempt to avoid being typecast, publicists presented her as an exotic, mysterious woman in real life. The publicity claimed that her name was an anagram of "Arab Death" and that she had grown up in Egypt, the daughter of a sculptor and a French actress. Many of her roles had her in diaphanous and extremely suggestive costumes in the Oriental style. In addition to characters like Cleopatra and Salome, she played madwomen, artists' muses, and the victim of a haunting.
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Theda Bara, the best known of a large number of screen vamps, was born in the Sahara Desert. "Weaned on serpents' blood," she grew into "a crystal-gazing seeress of profoundly occult powers" (9). Her name was an anagram for "Arab Death."
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