Louise Brooks facts for kids

Quick facts for kids Louise Brooks
Brooks c. 1926
Born	Mary Louise Brooks (1906-11-14)November 14, 1906 Cherryvale, Kansas, U.S.
Died	August 8, 1985(1985-08-08) (aged 78) Rochester, New York, U.S.
Resting place	Holy Sepulchre Cemetery (Rochester, New York)
Other names	Lulu, Brooksie, The Girl in the Black Helmet
Occupation	Actress dancer writer
Years active	1925–1938
Known for	Pandora's Box (1929) Diary of a Lost Girl (1929)
Spouse(s)	A. Edward Sutherland ​ ​ (m. 1926; div. 1928)​ Deering Davis ​ ​ (m. 1933; div. 1938)​

Mary Louise Brooks (November 14, 1906 – August 8, 1985) was an American film actress and dancer during the 1920s and 1930s. She is regarded today as an icon of the Jazz Age and flapper culture, in part due to the bob hairstyle that she helped popularize during the prime of her career.

At the age of 15, Brooks began her career as a dancer and toured with the Denishawn School of Dancing and Related Arts where she performed opposite Ted Shawn. After being fired, she found employment as a chorus girl in George White's Scandals and as a dancer in the Ziegfeld Follies in New York City. While dancing in the Follies, Brooks came to the attention of Walter Wanger, a producer at Paramount Pictures, and was signed to a five-year contract with the studio. She appeared in supporting roles in various Paramount films before taking the heroine's role in Beggars of Life (1928). During this time, she became an intimate friend of actress Marion Davies and joined the elite social circle of press baron William Randolph Hearst at Hearst Castle in San Simeon.

Dissatisfied with her mediocre roles in Hollywood films, Brooks went to Germany in 1929 and starred in three feature films that launched her to international stardom: Pandora's Box (1929), Diary of a Lost Girl (1929), and Miss Europe (1930); the first two were directed by G. W. Pabst. By 1938, she had starred in seventeen silent films and eight sound films. After retiring from acting, she fell upon financial hardship. Following the rediscovery of her films by cinephiles in the 1950s, a reclusive Brooks began writing articles about her film career; her insightful essays drew considerable acclaim. She published her memoir, Lulu in Hollywood, in 1982. Three years later, she died of a heart attack at age 78.

Early life

Brooks as a sophomore in high school, 1922. She had worn bobbed hair since childhood.

Born in Cherryvale, Kansas, Louise Brooks was the daughter of Leonard Porter Brooks, a lawyer, who was usually preoccupied with his legal practice, and Myra Rude. Rude was a talented pianist who played the latest Debussy and Ravel for her children, inspiring them with a love of books and music.

In 1919, Brooks and her family moved to Independence, Kansas, before relocating to Wichita the following year, in 1920.

Brooks began her entertainment career as a dancer, joining the Denishawn School of Dancing and Related Arts modern dance company in Los Angeles at the age of 15 in 1922. The company included founders Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn, as well as a young Martha Graham. As a member of the globe-trotting troupe, Brooks spent a season abroad in London and in Paris. In her second season with the Denishawn company, Brooks advanced to a starring role in one work opposite Shawn. However, a long-simmering personal conflict between Brooks and St. Denis boiled over one day, and St. Denis abruptly fired Brooks from the troupe in the spring of 1924, telling her in front of the other members: "I am dismissing you from the company because you want life handed to you on a silver salver." These words made a strong impression on Brooks; when she drew up an outline for a planned autobiographical novel in 1949, "The Silver Salver" was the title she gave the tenth and final chapter. Brooks was 17 years old at the time of her dismissal. Thanks to her friend Barbara Bennett, the sister of Constance and Joan Bennett, Brooks almost immediately found employment as a chorus girl, followed by an appearance as a dancer in the 1925 edition of the Ziegfeld Follies at the Amsterdam Theater on 42nd Street.

As a result of her work in the Follies, Brooks came to the attention of Walter Wanger, a producer at Paramount Pictures. An infatuated Wanger signed her to a five-year contract with the studio in 1925.

Career

Paramount films

Brooks and Gregory Kelly in The Show-Off (1926)

Brooks made her screen debut in the silent The Street of Forgotten Men, in an uncredited role in 1925. Soon, however, she was playing the female lead 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.

After her small roles in 1925, both Paramount and MGM offered her contracts. She decided to accept Paramount's offer. During this time, Brooks gained a cult following in Europe for her pivotal vamp role in the 1928 Howard Hawks silent buddy film A Girl in Every Port. Her distinctive bob haircut helped start a trend, and many women styled their hair in imitation of both her and fellow film star Colleen Moore.

Brooks and Gustav von Seyffertitz in The Canary Murder Case (1929)

Soon after the production of Beggars Of Life (1928), Brooks began filming the pre-Code crime-mystery film The Canary Murder Case (1929). Brooks, who now loathed the Hollywood "scene", refused to stay on at Paramount after being denied a promised raise. Learning of her refusal, her friend George Preston Marshall counseled her to sail with him to Europe in order to make films with director G. W. Pabst, the prominent Austrian director. On the last day of filming The Canary Murder Case Brooks departed Paramount Pictures to leave Hollywood for Berlin to work for Pabst. It was not until thirty years later that this rebellious decision would come to be seen as arguably the most beneficial to her career, securing her immortality as a silent film legend and independent spirit.

While her snubbing of Paramount alone would not have finished her altogether in Hollywood, her subsequent refusal, after returning from Germany, to come back to Paramount for sound retakes of The Canary Murder Case (1929) irrevocably placed her on an unofficial blacklist. Angered by her refusal, the studio allegedly claimed that Brooks's voice was unsuitable for sound pictures and another actress, Margaret Livingston, was hired to dub Brooks's voice for the film.

European films

Brooks in her famous role as Lulu in the German film Pandora's Box (1929), directed by G. W. Pabst.

Brooks traveled to Europe accompanied by her paramour George Preston Marshall and his English valet. The German film industry was Hollywood's only major rival at the time, and the film industry based in Berlin was known as the Filmwelt ("film world") reflecting its own self-image as a highly glamorous "exclusive club". After their arrival in Weimar Germany, she starred in the 1929 silent film Pandora's Box, directed by Pabst in his New Objectivity period. Pabst was one of the leading directors of the filmwelt, known for his refined, elegant films that represented the filmwelt "at the height of its creative powers". The film Pandora's Box is based on two plays by Frank Wedekind (Erdgeist and Die Büchse der Pandora), and Brooks plays the central figure, Lulu.

Brooks's performance in Pandora's Box made her into a star. In looking for the right actress to play Lulu, Pabst had rejected Marlene Dietrich as "too old and too obvious". In choosing Brooks, a relative unknown who had only appeared—not to very great effect—in secondary roles, Pabst was going against the advice of those around him. Brooks recalled that "when we made Pandora's Box, Mr. Pabst was a man of 43 who astonished me with his knowledge on practically any subject. I, who astonished him because I knew practically nothing on every subject, celebrated my twenty-second birthday with a beer party on a London street."

Brooks in a 1930 publicity still.

When audiences and critics first viewed Brooks's German films, they were bewildered by her naturalistic acting style. Viewers purportedly exited the theatre vocally complaining, "She doesn't act! She does nothing!" In the late 1920s, cinemagoers were habituated to stage-style acting with exaggerated body language and facial expressions. Yet Brooks's acting style was subtle because she understood that the close-up images of the actors' bodies and faces made such exaggerations unnecessary. When explaining her acting method, Brooks posited that acting "does not consist of descriptive movement of face and body but in the movements of thought and soul transmitted in a kind of intense isolation." This innovative style continues to be used by contemporary film actors but, at the time, it was surprising to viewers who assumed she wasn't acting at all. Film critic Roger Ebert later wrote that, by employing this acting method, "Brooks became one of the most modern and effective of actors, projecting a presence that could be startling."

Her appearances in Pabst's two films made Brooks an international star.

After the success of her German films, Brooks appeared in one more European film entitled Miss Europe (1930), a French film by Italian director Augusto Genina.

Return to America

Brooks and Jack Shutta (right) on the lobby card for Windy Riley Goes Hollywood (1931)

Dissatisfied with Europe, Brooks returned to New York in December 1929. When Brooks returned to Hollywood in 1931, she was cast in two mainstream films, God's Gift to Women (1931) and It Pays to Advertise (1931), but her performances were largely ignored by critics, and few other job offers were forthcoming due to her informal "blacklisting".

Brooks in Overland Stage Raiders (1938), her final film. Note her long hairstyle, drastically different from her trademark bob haircut

Brooks attempted a film comeback in 1936 and did a bit part in Empty Saddles, a Western that led Columbia to offer her a screen test, contingent on appearing in the 1937 musical When You're in Love, uncredited, as a specialty ballerina in the chorus. In 1937, Brooks managed to obtain a bit part in the film King of Gamblers after a private interview on a Paramount set with director Robert Florey, who "specialised in giving jobs to destitute and sufficiently grateful actresses." Unfortunately, after filming, Brooks's scenes were deleted.

Brooks made two more films after that, including the 1938 Western Overland Stage Raiders in which she played the romantic lead opposite John Wayne, with a long hairstyle that rendered her all but unrecognizable from her Lulu days. In contemporary reviews of that Western in newspapers and trade publications, Brooks received little attention from critics.

Life after film

Economic hardship

Brooks's career prospects as a film actress had significantly declined by 1940. According to the federal census in May that year, she was living in a $55-a-month apartment at 1317 North Fairfax Avenue in West Hollywood and was working as a copywriter for a magazine. Soon, however, Brooks found herself unemployed and increasingly desperate for a steady income.

After an unsuccessful attempt at operating a dance studio, she returned to New York City. Following brief stints there as a radio actor in soap operas and a gossip columnist, she worked as a salesgirl in a Saks Fifth Avenue store in Manhattan.

Rediscovery

In 1955, French film historians such as Henri Langlois rediscovered Brooks's films, proclaiming her an unparalleled actress who surpassed even Marlene Dietrich and Greta Garbo as a film icon, much to her purported amusement. This rediscovery led to a Louise Brooks film festival in 1957 and rehabilitated her reputation in her home country.

During this time, James Card, the film curator for the George Eastman House, discovered Brooks "living as a recluse" in New York City. He persuaded her in 1956 to move to Rochester, New York, to be near the George Eastman House film collection where she could study cinema and write about her past career. With Card's assistance, she became a noted film writer. A collection of her writings, titled Lulu in Hollywood, published in 1982 and still in print, was heralded by film critic Roger Ebert as "one of the few film books that can be called indispensable."

In her later years, Brooks rarely granted interviews, yet had special relationships with film historians John Kobal and Kevin Brownlow. In the 1970s, she was interviewed extensively on film for the documentaries Memories of Berlin: The Twilight of Weimar Culture (1976), produced and directed by Gary Conklin, and Hollywood (1980), by Brownlow and David Gill. Lulu in Berlin (1984) is another rare filmed interview, produced by Richard Leacock and Susan Woll, released a year before her death but filmed a decade earlier. In 1979, she was profiled by the film writer Kenneth Tynan in his essay "The Girl in the Black Helmet", the title an allusion to her bobbed hair, worn since childhood. In 1982, writer Tom Graves was allowed into Brooks's small apartment for an interview, and later wrote about the often awkward and tense conversation in his article "My Afternoon with Louise Brooks".

Death

On August 8, 1985, after suffering from degenerative osteoarthritis of the hip and emphysema for many years, Brooks died of a heart attack in her apartment in Rochester, New York.

Personal life

In her later years, Brooks's friend and lover, William Paley, founder of CBS, gave her a check every month until her death.

In the summer of 1926, Brooks married Eddie Sutherland, the director of the film she made with W. C. Fields, but by 1927 had become infatuated with George Preston Marshall, owner of a chain of laundries and future owner of the Washington Redskins football team, following a chance meeting with him that she later referred to as "the most fateful encounter of my life".

Throughout the late 1920s and early 1930s, Brooks continued her on-again, off-again relationship with George Preston Marshall.

In 1933, she married Chicago millionaire Deering Davis, a son of Nathan Smith Davis Jr., but abruptly left him in March 1934 after only five months of marriage. The couple officially divorced in 1938.

In her later years, Brooks insisted that both her previous marriages were loveless and that she had never loved anyone in her lifetime.

Sometime in September 1953, Brooks converted to Roman Catholicism, but she left the church in 1964.

Filmography

As is the case with many of her contemporaries, a number of Brooks's films are considered to be lost. Her key films survive, however, particularly Pandora's Box and Diary of a Lost Girl, which have been released on DVD in North America by the Criterion Collection and Kino Video, respectively.

As of 2007, Miss Europe and The Show Off have also seen limited North American DVD release. Her short film (and one of her only talkies) Windy Riley Goes Hollywood was included on the DVD release of Diary of a Lost Girl. Her final film, Overland Stage Raiders, was released on VHS and then in 2012 on DVD.

See also

In Spanish: Louise Brooks para niños