Louise Brooks

Louise Brooks was an American silent-film actress and dancer whose two films with the German director G. W. Pabst, Pandora's Box (1929) and Diary of a Lost Girl (1929), and her bobbed haircut and modernist screen presence made her one of the most-recognized images of late-1920s film. She was born Mary Louise Brooks on November 14, 1906, in Cherryvale, Kansas, to a small-town lawyer father and a culturally ambitious mother who introduced her to Beethoven and Debussy in early childhood.

She left Kansas at age 15 to study with the Denishawn modern-dance company in New York and toured the United States as a dancer with Denishawn and then with the George White's Scandals and Ziegfeld Follies revues on Broadway. She was put under contract by Paramount Pictures in 1925 and appeared in 17 American films through 1928, including Howard Hawks's A Girl in Every Port (1928) and William Wellman's Beggars of Life (1928).

She refused to remain at Paramount for the studio's transition to sound films and instead sailed to Berlin in 1928 to make Pandora's Box and Diary of a Lost Girl for Pabst. The two films, both initially censored and commercially unsuccessful, were rediscovered by French film critics at the Cinémathèque française in the 1950s and have since been recognized as among the great achievements of late-silent-era cinema. Her sexually frank performance as Lulu in Pandora's Box remains among the most-written-about screen performances of the silent era.

Her Hollywood career did not survive her break with Paramount; she retired from film in 1938, lived for many years in obscurity in New York and Wichita, and in the 1950s began writing the autobiographical film essays collected in Lulu in Hollywood (1982), now regarded as one of the finest memoirs by a film actor. She died of a heart attack in Rochester, New York, on August 8, 1985, at age 78.

Her name Louise is the French feminine form of Louis, from the Germanic Hludwig, combining hlud meaning "famous" and wig meaning "battle" — that is, "famous in battle." Louise was one of the most-popular American girls' names in the early twentieth century when she was born.