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(Modest housewife Caroline Knollys discovers that she is p...)
Modest housewife Caroline Knollys discovers that she is pregnant. Rushing to tell her husband Hubert, she finds him in the arms of a younger woman. Determined to one day have revenge, she escapes to Europe. Despite having the baby, she transforms herself from housewife to vamp, becoming the most-talked about woman in Venice. Returning to America, she uses the child to blackmail her husband and his mistress. But Caroline finds that her love for Hubert was not as dormant as she thought, and instead decides to use her newly-won confidence to reunite the family. The Unchastened Woman is one of only three surviving films starring Theda Bara, the silver screen's first sex symbol. She made more than 40 films between 1914 and 1926, but most were destroyed by the 1937 fire that struck the 20th Century Fox storage facility in Little Ferry, New Jersey (The other two surviving Bara films are A Fool There Was from 1915 and East Lynne from 1916). Nicknamed ""The Vamp"" for her femme fatale roles that inevitably brought male characters to ruin, the exotic-looking Bara was said to be born in the Sahara to an Arab sheik. In actuality, she was born to a Polish family in Cincinnati, Ohio. Regardless, publicists enjoyed emphasizing that her name was an anagram of ""Arab death"". Eventually tiring of the vamp image, she let her contract with Fox expire in 1919. Without studio support, Bara's career suffered and she did not make another film until small startup company Chadwick Pictures signed her to star in The Unchastened Woman. Not proving to be the comeback she wished for, Bara never starred in another feature, retiring to her former home in Cincinnati.
(Widely regarded as the screen's first true sex symbol - a...)
Widely regarded as the screen's first true sex symbol - a leading actress whose charm was built not upon quaint innocence but carnal desire - Theda Bara revolutionized the adolescent art of cinematic sensuality. One of the very few Bara films that exist today, A Fool There Was catapulted the actress to stardom in 1915 and introduced the term "vamp" (both as a noun and a verb) to the American pop culture vocabulary. Bara plays the "Vampire," a cunning woman who uses her irresistible charms to seduce and abandon a series of influential men. When one lover commits suicide on the deck of a luxury liner, she merely turns her gaze to another passenger, John Schuyler (Edward Jose), and leads him down a path to moral degradation and public scorn. Schuyler's wife (Mabel Frenyear) never gives up hope for her husband's redemption but has severely underestimated the hypnotic power the Vampire has upon her victims. One of the most remarkable aspects of A Fool There Was is its uncompromising ending. Rather than offering a syrupy resolution of eleventh-hour moral enlightenment, the film allows its characters to follow their downward trajectories toward less edifying fates.
Theda Bara was an American silent film and stage actress.
Background
Bara was born Theodosia Burr Goodman on July 29, 1885 in the Avondale section of Cincinnati, Ohio, the daughter of Bernard Goodman, a Jewish tailor born in Poland who later became a partner in a Cincinnati clothing-manufacturing firm, and Pauline Louise de Coppet, a Frenchwoman who, before her marriage, dealt in hair goods.
Education
She attended the University of Cincinnati from 1903 to 1905, and was therefore one of the few early female movie stars (if not the only one) to have a college background. The family seems to have moved to New York in about 1905, possibly to foster their daughter's theatrical ambitions, and she may have attended dramatic school there.
Career
Her early stage career was minor and is poorly documented. She had at least one small part on Broadway (as Theodosia de Cappet), in The Devil (1908), probably played in various road companies, and may have appeared in a Yiddish theater on the Lower East Side, but it seems doubtful that she acted in Paris, as some sources suggest. In 1914 the Fox Film Company decided to produce a film version of the play A Fool There Was (inspired by Rudyard Kipling's poem "The Vampire"), and the director, Frank Powell, cast Theodosia under the name "Theda Bara, " in what was intended to be the subordinate role. The film was released in January 1915, and as The Vampire who lured a prominent businessman away from his family and drove him to drink and death, the sultry Theda Bara, with her imperious "Kiss me, my fool, " commanded all the attention.
When the Fox Company learned that all over the country exhibitors were billing her above the presumed star, Edward Jose, it signed her to a long-term starring contract; much of the initial success of the Fox film empire was based on her tremendous popularity. Between the beginning of 1915 and the end of 1919 Theda Bara wreaked her havoc through some thirty-nine Fox pictures, which the company turned out, in her own later words, like sausages. These bore such self-explanatory titles as Sin, Destruction, The Serpent, The Vixen, The Tiger Woman, and The Siren's Song. In other pictures of the same period she portrayed Carmen, Camille, Madame Du Barry, Salome, Mata Hari, and even, somewhat implausibly, Juliet. Theda Bara eventually commanded $4, 000 a week.
The peak of her career came in 1917 when Fox starred her in Cleopatra, her first film to be made in California rather than Jersey City or Fort Lee, N. J. The Fox Company deliberately publicized her near-nudity in the film and there were widespread calls for banning the picture. The Better Films Committee of the Woman's Club of Omaha, Neb. , condemned "Cleopatra" in what was described as the most exciting meeting it ever had, and Miss Bara filed a $100, 000 suit against the Chicago censor for refusing to give the picture a permit. The film was, of course, booked solid, and when the furor was over, it had made a million dollars. It was a performance hard to top, and the rest of her screen career was downhill.
A flood of press releases about her exotic, mysterious, snakelike personality, enhanced by lurid publicity pictures, soon led to such newspaper headlines as "Is This the Wickedest Face in the World?" She was touted as a reincarnation of the most evil women of the past, including Delilah and Lucrezia Borgia; she herself added to the legend by stating that in an earlier life she had been Egyptian, adding, "I remember crossing the Nile in barges to Karnak and Luxor as plainly as I recall crossing the Hudson Ferry today to come to the studio at Fort Lee. " Theda Bara was one of the most popular movie personalities of the day. A year after A Fool There Was the New York Times estimated that half a million people a day--or 182, 000, 000 a year--were seeing her pictures. She allegedly helped to make the use of cosmetics socially acceptable, and more certainly she was responsible for adding the word "vamp" to the English language as both a noun and a verb (although she always preferred the term "vampire").
As the United States emerged from World War I, audiences became less responsive to Theda Bara's hefty seductiveness and broad acting. When her contract expired in 1919, she left Fox. Receiving no further film offers, she returned to the legitimate stage in the melodramatic "The Blue Flame, " which opened on Broadway (in March 1920) to hostile reviews and audience laughter. Although the play closed in New York after a few weeks, during a long road tour crowds flocked to see the famous vampire in person. Early in the summer of 1921 she married Charles J. Brabin, who had directed her last Fox pictures, and eventually settled with him in Hollywood; they had no children. In 1925 she tried unsuccessfully to make a comeback in a picture defiantly titled The Unchastened Woman. Her last film, in 1926, was a two-reel comedy for Hal Roach, in which she burlesqued her old vampire roles. In retirement she was known as a gracious, cultivated, and often witty hostess, famous for collecting interesting people and serving gourmet meals. She died in Los Angeles after a long bout with cancer.
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This is a high-quality reproduction art print. The imag...)
Views
Quotations:
"To be good is to be forgotten. I'm going to be so bad I'll always be remembered. "
"The reason good women like me and flock to my pictures is that there is a little bit of vampire instinct in every woman. "
"I will continue doing vampires as long as people sin. "
Personality
Theda Bara clearly fulfilled America's notion of how a femme fatale should look. Ample of physique, she had the dark hair and eyes, heavily accentuated by dark shadow and mascara, that formed an important part of the stereotypical image of the sinful woman. She herself once asserted that brunettes were actually less cold-blooded and calculating than blondes, but added that as a vampire she had to be a brunette "because the popular idea of a wicked woman is a dark and midnight beauty. " No great dramatic talent was required for her parts, since, as she observed, "a rolling eye and an undraped figure was all the public required of a vampire. " Theda Bara's career showed that flamboyant publicity could create a national celebrity, for seldom has a film star risen to fame so rapidly.
She seems to have appealed more to women than to men because, as she observed, "the vampire I play is the vengeance of my sex upon its exploiters. I have the face of a vampire, but the heart of a feminist. "
In private life, it was discovered, she was scarcely a vampire, but rather a home-loving woman who lived quietly with her parents in an apartment on New York's West End Avenue and was fond of sausages, corned beef, and cabbage.
Connections
Early in the summer of 1921 she married Charles J. Brabin.