Vamp: The Rise and Fall of Theda Bara - Softcover

Golden, Eve

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1879511320 ISBN 13: 9781879511323

Publisher: Vestal Press, 1998

Synopsis

Theda Bars's remarkable life as told by Eve Golden's heartfelt account is short of discovering a means of traveling through time and as close as we are ever likely to get to meeting the screen's great Vamp!

About this title

From the Back Cover:

Theda Bara became an overnight superstar with her film debut in the scandalous 1915 hit A Fool There Was, and for the rest of that decade stayed at the top of the heap, along with Mary Pickford and Charlie Chaplin. Despite her fame and notoriety as the movies' first "sex symbol", no biography of the original Vamp has ever been written, even though Bara threatened to pen her own "because nobody ever wrote a true word about me". Finally, someone has. Bara had one of the most bizarre and colorful careers of the silent era, starring in Cleopatra, Salome, and scores of other hit films before vanishing mysteriously from the screen. Now, read for the first time how a nice Jewish girl from the Midwest became "Satan's Handmaiden", scandalized a nation, and abruptly fell from the heights.

From Booklist:

This is the first book-length study of the early silent film actress perhaps now most memorable for the coiled-snake bra she wore as Cleopatra. Despite her status as the first media superstar, there is a dearth of good contemporary material on her. Theda Bara was the first product of the star system, and her real biography was intentionally obfuscated during her lifetime. Although she had a comfortable, middle-class upbringing in Cincinnati, Bara (whose real name was Theodosia Goodman) was promoted as the daughter of a French actress and an Italian sculptor, born under the stony gaze of the Sphinx. Her personal appearances were choreographed to enhance an exotic image, and her film roles played on the public perception of her as a temptress, a "vamp." Golden argues that her career was the prototype for those of Harlow, Monroe, and Madonna. As with those later sex symbols, controversy over Bara revolves around whether she was a creation of studio publicity or "a decent actress, trapped in scores of bad films." Although Bara's best movies survive only in fragments, Golden believes she was the latter. Mike Tribby

About this edition

• Publisher: Vestal Press
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 1879511320
• ISBN 13: 9781879511323
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 288