The press said she was the daughter of an Arab sheik and a French actress, born in the shadow of the Sphinx, with a name that was an anagram for Arab Death. In reality she was Theodosia Burr Goodman, a tailor’s daughter from a middle-class Jewish family in Avondale, Cincinnati. This episode explores how William Fox’s publicity machine built Theda Bara, cinema’s original vamp, out of thin air, and how she went from Broadway debut in 1908 and extra work in Fort Lee, New Jersey, to the undisputed biggest star at Fox between 1915 and 1919, earning $4,000 a week.

We trace the vamp archetype back to Rudyard Kipling’s 1897 poem and a Philip Burne-Jones painting, explain how the name Theda Bara actually came from her childhood nickname and her grandmother’s surname, and follow her 1917 Cleopatra epic that pulled her and the industry west to Los Angeles. We then look at her decision to walk away from Fox in 1919, the brutal reviews for her 1920 stage return in The Blue Flame, her self-parodying comedy shorts directed by Stan Laurel, her peaceful retirement with director Charles Brabin, and the 1937 Fox vault fire that destroyed 32 of her 43 films.

• How fabricated studio biographies were printed as hard news in an era before mass media literacy
• Why the vamp tapped into male anxiety about women entering the workforce and demanding the vote
• The censorship debates over whether her films corrupted youth or taught moral lessons
• Why silent-film magnetism did not translate to the live stage
• Her surviving legacy: the Chicago International Film Festival logo, a 1994 postage stamp, and homages in Pearl and MaXXXine