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This listing is for an 8x10 size picture of actress 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. She was well known as a party girl, and was involved briefly in a bisexual affair with Greta Garbo. Soon after the film Beggars Of Life 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.

She was a notorious spendthrift for most of her life, even filing for bankruptcy once, but was kind and generous to her friends, almost to a fault. She was married twice, but never had children—she referred to herself as "Barren Brooks". Her first husband was director Edward Sutherland; they later divorced. Her second husband was Chicago millionaire Deering Davis; they married in 1933, Deering left her five months later, and they divorced in 1937.

Her many lovers from years before had included a young William S. Paley, the founder of CBS, who quietly provided for her while she was an outcast from the entertainment world, and living frugally.

Rediscovery

French film historians rediscovered her films in the early 1950s, proclaiming her as an actress who surpassed even Marlene Dietrich and Greta Garbo(Henri Langlois: "There is no Garbo, there is no Dietrich, there is only Louise Brooks!") as a film icon, much to her amusement, but it would lead to the still ongoing Louise Brooks film revivals, and rehabilitated her reputation in her home country. James Card, the film curator for the George Eastman House, discovered Louise living as a recluse in New York City about this time, and persuaded her to move to Rochester, New York to be near the George Eastman House film collection. With his help, she became a noted film writer in her own right. A collection of her witty and cogent writings, Lulu in Hollywood, was published in 1982. She was famously profiled by the noted film writer Kenneth Tynan in his essay, "The Girl With The Black Helmet", the title of which was an allusion to her fabulous bob,worn since childhood, a hairstyle claimed as one of the ten most influential in history by beauty magazines the world over.

She rarely gave interviews, but had a special relationship with John Kobal and Kevin Brownlow, the film historians, and they were able to capture on paper some of her amazing personality. Running 50 minutes, Lulu in Berlin (1984) is a rare filmed interview, produced by Richard Leacock and Susan Woll in the year before her death. She had lived alone by choice for many years, and Louise died from a heart attack in 1985, after suffering from arthritis and emphysema for many years.

A continuing inspiration

Louise is considered one of the first naturalistic actors in film, her acting being subtle and nuanced compared to many other silent performers. The close-up was just coming into vogue with directors, and Louise's almost hypnotically beautiful face was perfect for this new technique. Louise had always been very self-directed, even difficult, and was notorious for her salty language, which she didn't hesitate to use whenever she felt like it. In addition, she had made a vow to herself never to smile on stage unless she felt compelled to, and although the majority of her publicity photos show her with a neutral expression, she had a dazzling smile. By her own admission, she was a sexually liberated woman, not afraid to experiment, even posing nude for "art" photography, and her liaisons with many film people were legendary, although much of it is speculation.

Louise Brooks as an unattainable film image served as an inspiration for Adolfo Bioy Casares when he wrote his classic science fiction novel The Invention of Morel (1940) about a man attracted to Faustine, a woman who is only a projected 3-D image. In a 1995 interview, Casares explained that Faustine is directly based on his love for Louise Brooks who "vanished too early from the movies." Elements of The Invention of Morel, minus the science fictional hardware, served as a basis for Alain Resnais' enigmatic Last Year at Marienbad (1961), one of the most influential films of the 1960s.

In 1987, the first book devoted to Louise, "Louise Brooks: Portrait of an Anti-Star", by Rolland Jaccard, was published in France. Soon after, in 1989, Barry Paris wrote the definitive biography, "Louise Brooks", an exhaustively researched book hailed as a model for film biographies, and was an uncompromising look at Louise's life and times. Louise also had an influence in the graphics world - she had the distinction of inspiring two separate comics: the long-running "Dixie Dugan" newspaper strip by John H. Striebel that started in the late 1920's and ran until 1962, which grew out of the serialized novel and later stage musical, "Show Girl", that writer J.P. McEvoy had loosely based on Louise's days as a Follies girl on Broadway; and the erotic comic books of "Valentina", by the late Guido Crepax, which began publication in 1965 and continued for many years. Crepax became a friend and regular correspondent with Louise late in her life. Hugo Pratt, another comic artist, also used her as inspiration for characters, and even named them after her.

In 1991, the synth-pop group Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark released "Pandora's Box (It's a Long, Long Way)", and the collage-pop band Soul Coughing released "St. Louise Is Listening" in 1998, both inspired by Louise Brooks' life. She continues to inspire other musicians and there are more than a few references to her in current popular music.

A biographical film, Louise Brooks: Looking For Lulu, was made in 1998.

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