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 Ang ...