By today’s standards, Theda Bara wasn’t especially beautiful, nor was she a good actress — all overblown, cheesy gestures and expressions — but never forget that for a while, she was the biggest sex symbol of them all.
I just wish that most of her movies hadn’t been lost in a fire.
Broad, child bearing hips…good peasant stock.
Coincidence. Kim, there’s a guy on Ace’s site who writes Theda Bara mysteries. Name is Christopher DiGrazia. His stuff is on Amazon. I’ve read an excerpt. Seems like an interesting read. There’s a Kindle download for free on his second book.
Theodora Goodman, if memory serves. She attended my (high school) alma mater.
If my memory serves me right, there are some nice NSFW pics of Theda on the internet
She was mainly a silent film star – “overblown, cheesy gestures and expressions’ were a requirement to make up for the lack of actual dialog. Likewise for the overdone makeup – the actual colors were hideous to make sure the fairly insensitive black-and-white films of the era would produce something resembling reality. So whatever one’s opinion of the actress, don’t hold those things against her. (Holding me against her, on the other hand, would have been an entirely different and more pleasurable matter.)
Yup. Acting in the silent era had to be vastly overdone. It was a skilled art in itself.