Back in the silent movie era, William Fox, from the studio that shared
his name, came up with a novel idea...create a movie persona and then find
a person to fill it. The woman they found and molded into the modern day
vamp was
Theda Bara. As seen with this famous studio shot,
Bara
was pictured as a man eater in both a metaphorical and literal way. Her
breakthrough was the 1915 film A Fool There Was. She was the women
that men both wanted and feared. In the age of Freud, it's not hard to
see her apeal. She played the vamp both on stage and off for five years
and then her career ground to a halt with a disastrous go at the theater.
Her fault, as with most silent era stars, was that her voice didn't match
the mystery her on-screen persona portrayed.
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