Actors - Louise Brooks

Home > Listing Index > Actors > Louise Brooks

	Actors - Louise Brooks

Louise Brooks (November 14 1906 – August 8 1985) was an American actress and one of the most famous faces of the silver screen. Born Mary Louise Brooks in Cherryvale, Kansas, this beautiful dark-haired actress is primarily known for her roles in silent films made during the late Roaring Twenties in the United States and three films made in Europe in 1929 and 1930, as well as her trend-setting "bob" hairstyle. Louise Brooks remains a major style influence, is considered one of the great actresses of the movies, an indispensable writer about film, and one of the sexiest stars ever photographed.

From childhood to Hollywood

Her artistic parents were somewhat "ethereal", and although they inspired her with a love of books and music—her mother was a talented pianist who played the latest Debussy and Satie for her —they failed to protect her from childhood sexual abuse at the hands of a neighborhood predator. This single series of events was a major influence on her life and career—she once claimed she was incapable of real love. A natural actress and dancer, she was destined for great highs and lows.

She began her entertainment career as a talented dancer, appearing in her teens with the revolutionary Denishawn modern dance company whose members included Martha Graham, Ruth St. Denis, and Ted Shawn. After leaving Denishawn under a cloud (her soon-to-be-famous obstinacy did her a disservice here), she turned to her influential friends, and she was quickly a featured dancer in the 1925 edition of the Ziegfeld Follies on Broadway, where she was immediately noticed by the then New York-based movie studios for her great beauty. She was also noticed by visiting movie star Charlie Chaplin, in town for the premiere of his film "The Gold Rush" -- the two had a torrid affair that summer. Signing with Paramount Studios, where she stayed for most of the remainder of her American film career, her film debut was in the silent The Street of Forgotten Men in an uncredited role in 1925. Soon, however, she was playing the lead female role in a number of silent light comedies and "flapper" films over the next few years, starring with Adolphe Menjou, and W. C. Fields among others. She was noticed in Europe for her pivotal vamp role in the Howard Hawks directed silent "buddy film", A Girl In Every Port in 1928.

Her best American role was in one of the last silent film dramas, Beggars Of Life (1928), as an abused country girl on the run with Richard Arlen and Wallace Beery playing hoboes she meets while riding the rails. Much of this film was shot on location, an unusual practice for the time, and the boom microphone was invented for this film by the director, William Wellman, who needed it for one of the first experimental talking scenes in the movies. At this time in her life, she was rubbing elbows with the rich and famous, and was a regular guest of William Randolph Hearst and his mistress, Marion Davies, at San Simeon. Her distinctive bob haircut had started a sensational trend, as many women in the Western world cut their hair like hers. Soon after this film was made, Louise, who loathed the Hollywood "scene", refused a request to record voice-over tracks for The Canary Murder Case, and left for Europe to make films for G. W. Pabst, the great German Expressionist director, effectively ending her Hollywood Studio career.

European interlude

She starred in the remarkable 1928 film Pandora's Box, in which her waiflike role as the doomed flapper, Lulu, who meets her fate at the hands of Jack the Ripper after a series of salacious escapades, made her an icon of life and death in the Jazz Age. This film is notorious for its frank treatment of modern sexual mores, including the first screen portrayal of a lesbian. Louise then starred in the controversial social dramas Diary Of A Lost Girl (1929) and Prix de Beaute (1930), the latter being filmed in France, and having a famous, but mesmerizing, shock ending. All these films were heavily censored, as they were very "adult" and considered shocking in their time for their portrayals of sexuality, in addition to being highly critical of society. Although overlooked at the time because "talkies" were taking over the movies, these three films were later recognized as masterpieces of the Silent Age, with her role of Lulu now regarded as one of the greatest performances in film history.

Life after film

When she returned to Hollywood, she found herself effectively black-listed, and never again enjoyed her previous success. Rumours purportedly sent out by the studios claimed she had the wrong voice for the new sound films, but she actually possessed a hard-won beautiful and cultured voice. After the humiliation of being cast in B pictures by studio executives as punishment for her outspokenness and disdain for ill-written scripts, in 1938, she retired from show business, briefly returning to Wichita, where she was raised. "But that turned out to be another kind of hell," she wrote. "The citizens of Wichita either resented me having been a success or despised me for being a failure. And I wasn't exactly enchanted with them. I must confess to a lifelong curse: My own failure as a social creature." She returned East and worked as a sales girl in a Saks store in New York City for a few years, then eked out a living as a companion to a few select wealthy men. Louise unfortunately had a life-long love of alcohol, and was an alcoholic for a major portion of her life, although she exorcised that particular demon enough to begin writing about film, which became her second life.

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for Louise Brooks ]

This page is based on the copyrighted Wikipedia article Louise Brooks; it is used under the GNU Free Documentation License. You may redistribute it, verbatim or modified, providing that you comply with the terms of the GFDL.

Actors - Louise Brooks

From childhood to Hollywood

European interlude

Life after film

Searches on eBay

Related searches on eBay