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Welcome to another episode of Ukraine

Of you must remember this, the podcast dedicated to exploring the secret and or forgotten histories

of Hollywood's first century, part of the Infinite Guest Network from American Public Media.

I'm your host, Karina Longworth. Today's episode takes us back a full 100 years to 1914.

To talk about an actress whose name you may never have heard and whose movies you probably

haven't seen. At the peak of her career, Theta Barra was amongst the top three stars in Hollywood,

the other two being Mary Pickford and Charlie Chaplin. She was Hollywood's first sex symbol,

and the first star to have her biography totally made over as a publicity project,

and maybe American popular culture's first homegrown goth. After her first film,

a fool there was, Theta Barra became known as the vamp. She wasn't the first movie actress

branded a vamp, but Theta Barra did define the vamp sensibility in such a major way that her name

became synonymous with that sensibility far into the 20th century. It was a branding that Theta,

who in real life was an incredibly square bookworm from Ohio, would have loved to have been rid of,

but couldn't shake. Her career spanned from 1914 to 1919, an incredibly formative time for

the film industry, during which it evolved from a two-bit operation whose American wing was more

...