Tallulah Bankhead, the sandpaper-voiced actress who pronounced darling “dahling” and threw in a few extra syllables to boot, made only about a dozen movies, a number of them silent. Though she triumphed onstage, at least two generations have been born since her name last graced a marquee. And her appearances on television, mostly as herself, can be found on YouTube but have never inspired so much as a DVD package.

 

Tallulah Bankhead in the 1944 film “Lifeboat,” directed by Alfred Hitchcock, which was her best-known movie.

Yet Bankhead has been the subject of no fewer than six stage shows, the latest of which, “Looped,” begins previews on Broadway at the Lyceum Theater on Friday. What is it about the star that makes her such an enduring object of fascination, despite the skimpy electronic record?

Certainly traces of her celebrity remain. Bruce Willis andDemi Moore named a daughter Tallulah. Bankhead was partly the inspiration for Cruella De Vil in “101 Dalmatians.” And fans of dozens of drag queens, including Jim Bailey and the Dueling Tallulahs, are well aware of her. But unless they caught her only hit film, Hitchcock’s “Lifeboat” from 1944, few people under 50 are familiar with her work.

Bankhead’s infamy offstage and off screen is one reason for her staying power. Even in a business used to excess, she could be considered a true theater rebel: uninterested in a movie career, she was a hodgepodge of thrilling talent, ego, drunkenness, bisexuality and drug use. And she spoke openly about her life at a time when every misstep or extra pound wasn’t emblazoned on television and the Internet as it was happening.

“Daddy warned me about men and alcohol,” she once said. “But he never warned me about women and cocaine.”

Were she alive today, Bankhead would probably film her outlandish behavior herself.

“I think she had such a sense of humor about it all,” said Valerie Harper, who stars as Bankhead in “Looped,” written by Matthew Lombardo. “She was sort of her own reality TV show. She was always off script. She was painfully honest, often to her own detriment.”

Then, too, there is the disconnect between her years in the public eye and her background as the properly raised, Alabama-born daughter of a Democratic congressman, William Brockman Bankhead. He was speaker of the House of Representatives from 1936 until his death in 1940, during her heyday on the New York stage. She triumphed in “The Little Foxes” on Broadway in 1939, and again in “The Skin of Our Teeth” in 1942, and had been the toast of London in back-to-back plays for almost all of the 1920s.

She also toured with the Noël Coward play “Private Lives” both before and after its seven-month Broadway engagement in 1948 and ’49. (“We played it everywhere but underwater,” she reportedly said.)

“She was a product of a literate society,” said the actress Stefanie Powers, who played a hostage to Bankhead’s crazed abductor in “Die! Die! My Darling!,” the last film Bankhead made. Ms. Powers added: “To survive in the company of people who were creating theater and literature in those days, she had to touché with the best of them. The fact that she is remembered is a great tribute to the fact that her character was so original.”

Her biographer takes some issue with the character that’s been portrayed. “The cartoon of Tallulah does not bear much resemblance to the real Tallulah,” said Joel Lobenthal, author of “Tallulah! The Life and Times of a Leading Lady,” published in 2004. “But she was heavy into drinking and drugs in her later years, and that image of the cartoon eventually destroyed her career.”

“Looped” takes place during the rerecording, or looping, session for “Die! Die! My Darling!,” the 1965 thriller that’s now mainly thrilling for camp enthusiasts. Ms. Harper plays a world-weary Bankhead as she tries to tape one line of dialogue, an effort that takes hours because she is inebriated and difficult.

Several other shows have centered on Bankhead, especially in her drunken later years.Kathleen Turner toured in a one-woman “Tallulah” in 2000, the same year the play “Dahling: The Life and Times of Tallulah Bankhead” ran Off Broadway. Tovah Feldshuhstarred in “Tallulah Hallelujah!” Off Broadway shortly before that. Other actresses to take on the Bankhead persona include Helen Gallagher and Eugenia Rawls, who had been Ms. Bankhead’s co-star in “The Little Foxes.”

“I think people looked at her and saw freedom,” Ms. Harper said. “She was outspoken and funny. I remember my mom listening to Tallulah on the radio in the 1950s and saying, ‘You never know what she’s going to say next.’ ”

Undoubtedly, Bankhead was a part of popular culture in her lifetime. She appeared as herself more often than in character. Her cameo on “The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour” in the 1950s is a YouTube gem. When she played a bank robber named Black Widow in the “Batman” television series (filmed the year before Bankhead died, in 1968 at 66), she referred to the caped crusader as “bat doll.” Bankhead even played Las Vegas, making tacky fun out of her signature mink coats and cigarettes.

Mr. Lobenthal, who said he made a point in his book of exploring the glamorous and successful early years of Bankhead’s career, noted that she was under contract at Paramount from 1930 to 1932 but loathed the studio system. It was around this time that the mythology began to take hold. She became known for her one-liners, as much for their vulgarity as for their quick wit, especially after she was heard to say that she came to Hollywood to have sex with Gary Cooper (though her description was a bit more blunt). Hollywood under the Hays Code was no place for her.

She returned to theater, but as her offstage antics became more well known, audiences began to respond more to the image than to the acting. An infamous staging of “A Streetcar Named Desire” at City Center in 1956 became instant camp when laughing patrons focused on Bankhead’s mannerisms, not her performance as Blanche DuBois.

The rash of plays about Bankhead doesn’t surprise Mr. Lobenthal. “Someone drunk and foulmouthed is always popular in the theater,” he said. “Just look at Falstaff.”