Theda Bara

Often played the role of a sexy, foul temptress whose beauty and dangerous allure led good-hearted men to their doom.
Often wore panda-like eye makeup
Her famous line "Kiss me, my fool."

Almost all of her forty films have been lost (only six survive, as well as a handful of fragments, as of 2020), leaving her with perhaps the highest percentage of lost work of anybody with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
Bara was very near-sighted and, like other myopic actors, she had to memorize the on set position of the furniture and props. She would then rehearse meticulously, working around them, before the cameras rolled.
For a time, she became a victim of her own screen image. Making movies at a time when audiences thought that the character that the actor played was the person that they were in real life. She often found herself ostracized publicly. Late in her career she would tell stories of being refused service in restaurants and one nurse's refusal to admit her husband into the hospital, after an accident, because the woman thought that she had caused it. Many of these stories were greatly exaggerated, mostly by Bara herself, but she told them to establish the kind of perception that she had given the public.
Only a few seconds of her most famous film Cleopatra (1917) still survive. It was last seen in 1934 when Cecil B. DeMille viewed it for his own remake.
Most of her films were unfortunately lost in 1937, in a fire at Fox Studios. Bara had her own personal archive. She did not realize that the nitrate film had disintegrated until the 1940s when she took some reels out to show a child friend, who she hoped would play herself in a film.

I have the face of a vampire, but the heart of a feminist.
[in 1917] During the rest of my screen career, I am going to continue doing vampires as long as people sin. For I believe that humanity needs the moral lesson and it needs it in repeatedly larger doses.
To understand those days, you must consider that people believed what they saw on the screen. Nobody had destroyed the grand illusion. Audiences thought the stars were the way they saw them. Why, women kicked my photographs as they went into the theaters where my pictures were playing. And once on the streets of New York, a woman called the police because her child spoke to me.
[on director] J. Gordon Edwards was kind and considerate and the nicest director I ever had. Some directors are wonderful. They give you such funny advice on manners and deportment. "Do I repulse the advances of the leading man or do I lead him on?" I asked. The director was stumped. He hadn't an idea of what to do. Finally, he hit upon a lively answer. "Oh, just keep the audience guessing," he said.
[on husband Charles Brabin] His mental brilliance was not the first attractive quality I noticed about him. It was the way he walked. Like an Indian, or, as if he wore seven-league boots. He stalked in and in two strides crossed the room. It still fascinates me to sit and watch him approach me.