Before Sophia Loren, Elizabeth Taylor, Marilyn Monroe or Greta Garbo, there was Theda Bara, the original VAMP of the silver screen. She made a career playing the embodiment of female sexual empowerment, the original femme fatale.

Before the fame, she was a bookish theatre nerd from Ohio. Plucked from obscurity and rocketed into stardom overnight.

But as quickly as her star rose it would fall, and her name has become nothing more than a footnote in cinema history. Let’s fix that.