Barbara Kent, December 16, 1907 – October 13, 2011

Barbara Kent: “I really didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life, but being an actress was not it.”

—The Sound of Silence, by Michael Ankerich.

Barbara Kent, b. Barbara Cloutman, who passed away a few weeks ago, was one of the last surviving movie stars—Mickey Rooney, ailing and frail, might be the last—who worked in the golden era of silent movies and then made the transition to sound.

She was a reluctant actress, a star whose light shined quite briefly, and then with exquisite sanity, she stepped out of the limelight and into the embrace of private life and marriage.

In 1925 Kent won the Miss Hollywood beauty pageant. Apparently, her parents pushed her to enter the contest. Thus, from the very beginning, Barbara was playing a role she neither sought nor desired. Though she had no acting experience, Universal offered the tiny—she was under five feet tall—baby-faced, 17 year-old beauty queen a contract.

In 1926, Kent was cast in ”Flesh and the Devil” (1926) as a young woman in love with the dashing John Gilbert who has eyes only for the heartless vamp Greta Garbo. Garbo gets all the loving close-ups, but I’ve always felt that Kent was far more attractive and desirable than the remote and narcissistic Garbo.

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In 1918, Theda Bara  was one of three great stars in Hollywood. Leading in popularity and box office appeal was Mary Pickford. Charlie Chaplin came second. And not far behind these two giants of the silver screen, Theda Bara.

She was the hottest sex symbol to hit the motion picture screen since, well, since the flickers started flickering. Bara was, the Vamp, the sexually insatiable woman, the lethal seductress who sucks the life out of a man, then abandons him, leaving only chaos and destruction in her wake.

This was, of course, a carefully created image.

Theda Bara as Cleopatra, 1917, a lost film.

Theda Bara was, in fact, Theodosia Burr Goodman, (1885-1955) a Jewish woman from Cincinnati who led a quiet and scandal free private life. In fact, she was a bookworm who liked nothing better than to curl up with a cup of tea and devour volume after volume of poetry and art history. She did not drink alcohol, go to night clubs, take drugs, or indulge in wild sexual escapades. She worked hard in the flourishing motion picture industry, saved money, stayed married to one man, director Charles Brabin, and wisely invested her considerable earnings. (more…)