VAMP IT UP! Theda Bara, International Silent Movie Star and Sex Symbol, Put Romance on Film in Ithaca By Aaron Pichel
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ust over 100 years ago, Theda Bara (1885-1955), the world’s first international movie sex symbol, came to Ithaca, New York, to film parts of the feature romance “Kathleen Mavourneen” for the William Fox studio. The global superstar alighted down the steps of a train from New York City in June of 1919 and took the small city by storm. “With her company, … [Bara] is filming her new William Fox feature, “Kathleen Mavourneen,” because the Finger Lakes in their picturesque wildness are the nearest in America like the Lakes of Killarney,” Ire-
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land, noted the Ithaca Journal at the time of Bara’s arrival. For the production, the Fox company rented the Wharton brothers’ Ithaca movie studio located in Renwick (now Stewart) Park at the southern tip of Cayuga Lake. Director Charles J. Brabin (1882-1957) also planned to shoot many exteriors in the Ithaca area, making use of Ithaca’s early summer environs to simulate the glens, fields and waterways of old Ireland, where the movie’s story is set. While Bara’s role — and the movie itself — would become the subject of violent controversy when the film was released to theaters in the fall of 1919, all was bucolic
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during production in Ithaca. Even love was in the air for the Ithaca-made picture, as the star first worked with director Brabin, the man who would soon become her devoted husband. THEDA BARA THE VAMP
At the time of her arrival in Ithaca, Bara was near the peak of her global fame. She had gained worldwide notoriety playing exotic, sexualized characters known as “vamps” (short for vampire — the seducing sort, not the undead blood-suckers). The term “vampire” for a seductive woman was derived from a well-known 1897 poem, “The Vampire,” by Rudyard Kipling.
Between 1915 and 1919, Bara played numerous vamp roles depicting seducers using their sexual attractions to exploit men, in movies such as “The Devil’s Daughter” (1915), “Carmen” (1915), “The Eternal Sapho” (1916), “Cleopatra” (1917), “Salomé”
Ac t r e s s Th e d a B a r a i n a n iconic pose from one of h e r m o s t fa m o u s r o l e s a s C l e o pat r a f o r t h e 1 9 1 7 s i l e n t f e at u r e . O n ly 2 0 s e c o n d s o f f r ag m e n t s o f t h e e p i c p r o d u c t i o n s u rv i v e . ( P h o t o i l l u s t r at i o n b y A n g e l H e r n a n d e z)