A Fool There Was
1915"Kiss me, my fool!"
Theda Bara plays "The Vampire" -- never given an actual name -- and the film made her one of the first manufactured movie stars, complete with a fabricated backstory claiming she was born in the shadow of the Sphinx to a French artist and an Arabian princess (she was actually from Cincinnati). Its intertitle "Kiss me, my fool!" became one of the most quoted lines of the silent era, endlessly repeated and misquoted as "kiss me, you fool" for decades after. The film adapts a 1909 Broadway play, itself inspired by Rudyard Kipling's poem "The Vampire," and it's largely responsible for popularizing the word "vamp" as shorthand for a seductive femme fatale.