Louise Brooks

Louise Brooks was born in Cherryvale, Kansas, in 1906, a bookish and rebellious girl who escaped small-town life through dance. She trained with the pioneering Denishawn company and kicked in the chorus of the Ziegfeld Follies before Paramount signed her, drawn to a face framed by a jet-black bob so sleek it looked lacquered on. That haircut alone would launch a thousand imitators.

In Hollywood she was cast as flappers and wisecracking girls in pictures like A Girl in Every Port and Beggars of Life, but the studio never grasped what it had, and Brooks bristled at the machine. So she did something almost unheard of: she walked away from Hollywood at the height of her youth and sailed to Germany to work with director G.W. Pabst.

There she made the two films that would immortalize her. As Lulu in Pandora's Box (1929) she played a woman of frank, guiltless sexuality who destroys every man around her and is finally destroyed herself, and she played it without a shred of moralizing, luminous and modern in a way that still feels startling. In Diary of a Lost Girl the same year she was just as raw and alive.

Then it collapsed. She refused to return to Hollywood for sound retakes on a film, was quietly blacklisted, and by the late 1930s her career was over. She drifted through failed comebacks and lean years, working for a time as a salesgirl in New York. Cinema might have forgotten her entirely, but European archivists and critics, led by the founder of the Cinematheque francaise, rediscovered her films and declared her one of the screen's great faces.

In her later decades in Rochester, New York, Brooks reinvented herself again as a sharp, unsparing writer, publishing essays and the memoir Lulu in Hollywood that remain among the best prose any film star ever wrote. She died in 1985, more celebrated than she had ever been while working.