2. A Fool There Was (The Original) is an American silent drama film produced by William Fox, directed by Frank Powell, and starring Theda Bara. Released in 1915, the film was long considered controversial for such risqué intertitle cards as "Kiss me, my fool!"
A Fool There Was is one of the few extant films featuring Theda Bara. It popularized the word vamp (short for vampire), which describes a femme fatale who causes the moral degradation of those she seduces, first fascinating and then exhausting her victims.
In 2015, the United States Library of Congress selected the film for preservation in the National Film Registry, finding it "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".
Theda Bara is probably the most famous American silent film star whose reputation is based on films that are irretrievably lost. Of the forty films she made between 1914 and 1919, only three survive, and of those only one displays her as her celebrated persona of a vamp—a woman who preys upon men and exploits their emotional and sexual frailties. That film is A Fool There Was, based on Porter Emerson Browne’s 1909 hit play. It is Bara’s first starring role, and the film’s enormous success both built her fortune and secured the future for pioneer producer William Fox and the Fox Film Corporation.
Plot: John Schuyler (Edward José), a rich Wall Street lawyer and diplomat, is a husband and a devoted family man. He is sent to England on a diplomatic mission without his wife and daughter. On the ship he meets the "Vampire woman" (Theda Bara) – a psychic vampire described as "a woman of the vampire species" – who uses her charms to seduce men, only to leave after ruining their lives. Schuyler is yet another one of her victims who falls completely under her control. In the process of succumbing to her will, he abandons his family, loses his job and social standing, and becomes a raving drunkard. All attempts by his family to get him to return fail, and the hapless "fool" plunges ever deeper into physical and mental degradation.
3. Ida Estelle Taylor (May 20, 1894 – April 15, 1958) was an American actress who was the second of world heavyweight champion Jack Dempsey's four wives. With "dark-brown, almost black hair and brown eyes," she was regarded as one of the most beautiful silent film stars of the 1920s.
After her stage debut in 1919, Taylor began appearing in small roles in World and Vitagraph films. She achieved her first success with While New York Sleeps (1920), in which she played three different roles, including a femme fatale, or "vamp." She was a contract player of Fox Film Corporation and, later, Paramount Pictures, but for the majority of her career she freelanced. She became famous and was commended by reviewers for her portrayals of historical women in important films: Miriam in The Ten Commandments (1923), Mary, Queen of Scots in Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall (1924), and Lucrezia Borgia in Don Juan (1926).
4. Theda Bara born Theodosia Burr Goodman; July 29, 1885 – April 7, 1955) was an American silent film and stage actress.
Bara was one of the more popular actresses of the silent era and one of cinema's early sex symbols. Her femme fatale roles earned her the nickname "The Vamp" (short for vampire, here meaning a seductive woman), later fueling the rising popularity in "vamp" roles based in exoticism and sexual domination. The studios promoted a fictitious persona for Bara as an Egyptian-born woman interested in the occult. Bara made more than 40 films between 1914 and 1926, but most are now lost, having been destroyed in the 1937 Fox vault fire. After her marriage to Charles Brabin in 1921, she made two more feature films and then retired from acting in 1926; she never appeared in a sound film.