There were administrational problems concerning finance so I had to leave the previous AA100 the Arts Past and Present presentation which started October 2014.
I am however enrolled successfully now and in February 2015 starting the same module under Dr. Sandra Buckland and Dr. Gerry Oram and absolutely loving it.
I have also decided to specialise my degree in the Humanities with Religious Studies which has today been approved by the Student Support team at the Open University.
To say I am enjoying this first part of the Module on Reputations would be an understatement as I am really happy.
I have completed studying the first Chapter on Cleopatra and starting preparation for the first part of Assignment One on her. I am also enjoying some peripheral study which at the moment is an opportunity to look at the silent movie actress Theda 'the Vamp' Bara (real name Theodosia Goodman) who played the title role in one of the earliest Cleopatra movies in 1917. Here's some interesting stuff on Theda.
My source and referencing comes from an array of places but for now here is what Wikipedia has for her.
If anyone would like to share an opinion concerning the relationship between Cleopatra and Mark Anthony or the life of Theda Bara I really would like to hear from you.
Bara was one of the most popular actresses of the silent era, and one of cinema's earliest sex symbols. Her femme fatale roles earned her the nickname The Vamp (short for vampire). Bara made more than 40 films between 1914 and 1926, but most are now lost because the 1937 Fox vault fire destroyed most of her films. After her marriage to Charles Brabin in 1921, she made two more feature films and retired from acting in 1926 having never appeared in a sound film. She died of stomach cancer on April 7, 1955 at the age of 69.
She was born Theodosia Burr Goodman in the Avondale section of Cincinnati, Ohio. Her father was Bernard Goodman (1853–1936),[2] a prosperous Jewish tailor born in Poland. Her mother, Pauline Louise Françoise (née de Coppett; 1861–1957), was born in Switzerland.[3] Bernard and Pauline married in 1882. She had two siblings: Marque (1888–1954)[4] and Esther (1897–1965),[2] who also became a film actress as Lori Bara and married Francis W. Getty of London in 1920.
Bara attended Walnut Hills High School graduating in 1903. After attending the University of Cincinnati for two years, she worked mainly in theatre productions, but did explore other projects. After moving to New York City in 1908, she made her Broadway debut in The Devil (1908).
Most of Bara's early films were shot around the East Coast, primarily at the Fox Studios in Fort Lee, New Jersey.[5] Bara lived with her family in New York City during this time. The rise of Hollywood as the centre of the American film industry forced her to relocate to Los Angeles to film the epic Cleopatra (1917), which became one of Bara's biggest hits. No known prints of Cleopatra exist today, but numerous photographs of Bara in costume as the Queen of the Nile have survived.
Between 1915 and 1919, Bara was Fox studio's biggest star but, tired of being typecast as a vamp, she allowed her five-year contract with Fox to expire. Her final Fox film was The Lure of Ambition (1919). Her career suffered without Fox studio's support, and she did not make another film until The Unchastened Woman (1925) for Chadwick Pictures Corporation. Bara retired after making only one more film, the short comedy Madame Mystery (1926), made for Hal Roach and directed by Stan Laurel, in which she parodied her vamp image.
At the height of her fame, Bara earned $4,000 per week. She was one of the most popular movie stars, ranking behind only Charlie Chaplin and Mary Pickford.[6] Bara's best-known roles were as the "vamp", although she attempted to avoid typecasting by playing wholesome heroines in films such as Under Two Flags and Her Double Life. She also appeared as Juliet in a version of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. Although Bara took her craft seriously, she was too successful as an exotic "wanton woman" to develop a more versatile career.
The origin of Bara's stage name is disputed; The Guinness Book of Movie Facts and Feats says it came from director Frank Powell, who learned Theda had a relative named Barranger, and that "Theda" was a childhood nickname. In promoting the 1917 film Cleopatra, Fox Studio publicists noted that the name was an anagram of Arab death, and her press agents claimed inaccurately that she was "the daughter of an Arab sheik and a French woman, born in the Sahara."[7][8] In 1917 the Goodman family legally changed its surname to Bara.[9]
Bara is often cited as the first sex symbol[10] of the movies.[11] She was well known for wearing very revealing costumes in her films. Such outfits were banned from Hollywood films after the Production Code started in 1930, and then was more strongly enforced in 1934.
It was popular at that time to promote an actress as mysterious, with an exotic background. The studios promoted Bara with a massive publicity campaign, billing her as the Egyptian-born daughter of a French actress and an Italian sculptor. They claimed she had spent her early years in the Sahara Desert under the shadow of the Sphinx, then moved to France to become a stage actress. (In fact, Bara had never been to Egypt or France.) They called her the Serpent of the Nile and encouraged Bara to discuss mysticism and the occult in interviews. Some film historians point to this as the birth of two Hollywood phenomena: the studio publicity department and the press agent, which would later evolve into the public relations person.
Bara married British-born American film director Charles Brabin in 1921. They honeymooned in Nova Scotia at The Pines Hotel in Digby, Nova Scotia and later purchased a 400 hectares (990 acres) property down the coast from Digby at Harbourville overlooking the Bay of Fundy, eventually building a summer home they called Baranook.[12] They had no children. Bara resided in a villa-style home which served as the "honours villa" at Xavier University in Cincinnati, Ohio. Demolition of the home began in July, 2011 [13]
In 1936, she appeared on Cecil B. DeMille's Lux Radio Theatre in a broadcast version of The Thin Man with William Powell and Myrna Loy. She did not appear in the play but instead announced her plans to make a movie comeback. This may be the only surviving recording of her voice. The 'comeback' never materialized.
In 1949, producer Buddy DeSylva and Columbia Pictures expressed interest in making a movie of Bara's life, starring Betty Hutton, but the project never materialized.
On April 7, 1955, Bara died of stomach cancer in Los Angeles, California. She was interred as Theda Bara Brabin in Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery in Glendale, California.
For her contribution to the film industry, Theda Bara has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
Bara is one of the most famous completely silent stars – she never appeared in a sound film, lost or otherwise. A 1937 fire at Fox's nitrate film storage vaults in New Jersey destroyed most of that studio's silent films. Bara made more than forty films between 1914 and 1926, but complete prints of only six still exist: The Stain (1914), A Fool There Was (1915), East Lynne (1916), The Unchastened Woman (1925), and two short comedies for Hal Roach.
In addition to these, a few of her films remain in fragments including Cleopatra (just a few seconds of footage), a clip thought to be from the Soul of Buddha, and a few other unidentified clips featured in a French documentary, Theda Bara et William Fox (2001). Most of the clips can be seen in the documentary The Woman with the Hungry Eyes (2006). As to vamping, critics stated that her portrayal of calculating, cold hearted women was morally instructive to men. Bara responded by saying, "I will continue doing vampires as long as people sin." [15]
In 1994, she was honoured with her image on a United States postage stamp designed by caricaturist Al Hirschfeld.
The Fort Lee Film Commission dedicated Main Street and Linwood Avenue in Fort Lee, New Jersey, as "Theda Bara Way" in May 2006 to honour Bara, who made many of her films at the Fox Studio on Linwood and Main.
Joel