From the current WINTER 2026 Issue

The life and career of LOUISE BROOKS,
silent movie star--and 21st Century icon

LITTLE GIRL LOST

By Phil Marsh

There are performers who become famous for their talent — which is not a small accomplishment. Then there are performers who leave a legacy that goes far beyond their body of work.

In the 21st Century, we hear a lot about people who claim to be “influencers”; that is, people who use social media to promote certain products and services. In other words, shills; mostly useless people performing a mostly useless function.

Louise Brooks, on the other hand, was a genuine influencer.

Her life as a movie star was brief and the films that brought her fame are rarely (if ever) shown on television; some are simply considered lost forever. More than one biography has focused on the tragedies that marked her life and career, yet even knowing the personal demons she battled can’t overshadow the fact that there was something magical and unique about her presence on the screen.

“I cannot understand why,” writer Kenneth Tynan once said, “even if she had not been a beauty, Hollywood failed to realize what a treasure it possessed in the sound of Louise Brooks.” He wasn’t alone; film critic Roger Ebert praised Brooks as “one of the most modern and effective of actors, projecting a presence that could be startling.” In that regard, her screen presence marked a turning point for the medium; in the words of French film historian Henri Langlois, “Her art is so pure that it becomes invisible.”

She was literally a “Lulu,” an independent-minded soul who left the country farm for the big city, armed with striking good looks, talent, brains and an impish sense of fun — and, just like the plot of one of her movies, men adored her and women wanted to be her. When the Hollywood dream turned sour, she walked away from it. Even today, nearly a century after her peak and some forty years after her death, Louise Brooks’ influence can still be felt — in movies, in books, in popular music … and in real life as well.

Mary Louise Brooks was born in 1906 in Cherryvale, KS, the daughter of a lawyer and an artistic mother who had little time for her child. When she was six, little Mary found sanctuary in dancing; by the time she was 15, she had left Kansas for California, where she joined the prestigious modern dance troupe at the Denishawn School of Dancing and Related Arts. She spent two years there, working alongside a young Martha Graham; as she recalled later, “I learned to act by watching Martha Graham dance, and I learned to dance by watching Charlie Chaplin act.”

Brooks was dismissed from the troupe at 17 by its founder, Ruth St. Denis, who apparently didn’t like the young dancer’s attitude; as she told Louise upon her dismissal, “you want life handed to you on a silver salver.” Thanks to her friend Barbara Bennett, Brooks found employment almost immediately, dancing in the choruses of George White’s Scandals and the Ziegfeld Follies.

Along the way, she was seen by movie producer Walter Wanger, who signed the free-spirited youngster to a five-year contract. The young lady who had gotten booted out of the Denishawn dance troupe was about to become a focal figure in the brave new world of cinema.

Within a year, things had kicked into high gear; in 1926, she appeared in six films, playing a Miss America contestant (opposite former Miss America Fay Lamphier) in The American Venus, a small-town manicurist-turned chorus girl in A Social Celebrity, an irresponsible kid sister in Love ‘Em and Leave ‘Em and the clerk at a small-town general store (owned by W.C. Fields) in It’s the Old Army Game. Over the next two years, Brooks added dramatic roles to her resume, playing a gangster’s moll in The City Gone Wild and a fugitive from the law who disguises herself as a boy in Beggars of Life.

Brooks was the perfect movie star for the Roaring ‘20s. She was petite (5’-2”) and strikingly attractive; what’s more, she invested each performance with personality and intensity, topped off with her pageboy haircut. Her characters weren’t shy about what they wanted and saw no problem in doing what they had to do to get it.

In a word, she was modern.

She lived and worked with a passion that was simultaneously fascinating and unsettling to those around her. She understood the mechanics of playing up to the camera. Her personal magnetism was built on extreme naturalness and simplicity, qualities she had in abundance. She endeared herself to thousands of new fans who now adopted her pageboy haircut and her I-do-as-I-please attitude. The movie populace had been waiting for a screen goddess and one had finally arrived — and fame was practically handed to her on a silver salver.

In time, Brooks became part of the inner circle of Hearst Castle at the request of new friend Marian Davies, wife of William Randolph Hearst. It was a choice well made; her merry disposition could produce cackling at an undertakers’ convention. Now, beyond working in films alongside the likes of W.C. Fields and Wallace Beery, she could exchange pleasantries with explorer Richard Byrd, compare photos with the legendary Edward Steichen and swap opinions with the Surrealist artist Man Ray.

Clara Bow may have been Hollywood’s “It” girl, but Brooks was attracting notice that went beyond Hollywood fan magazines. In 1926, she served as the inspiration for comic-strip heroine Dixie Dugan, making her the first movie star to be featured in her own action-adventure comic. (Four decades later, Italian cartoonist Guido Crepax offered a similar tribute to Brooks’ free spirit with his character Valentina.) It seemed as though things were taking off for the pixie with the bobbed hair.

Then, just as suddenly, that rocket to the stars took off in another direction.

Brooks had been filming The Canary Murder Case (with William Powell as detective Philo Vance) when Paramount reneged on a promised pay raise. Brooks became indignant and left the studio. Her friend, actor and screenwriter George Marshall, persuaded her to accompany him to Germany in 1929, to work with a talented Austrian director named G.W. Pabst.

To everyone in 1929 Hollywood, it must have looked as though Brooks had shot her career in the foot; in fact, her going to Germany helped make her a legend. With Pabst, Brooks made her most famous films, starting with 1929’s Pandora’s Box. In this silent drama, Brooks plays her most famous character, the free-spirited Lulu, whose uninhibited nature destroys those around her.

It was as Lulu that Brooks’ acting skill became truly apparent. Years later, she recalled leaving the premiere with Pabst and hearing the German crowd evaluating her performance. Pabst translated for her: “She doesn’t act. She does nothing.”

That’s not because she was stiff or wooden; rather, it was because her performance, as Roger Ebert wrote decades later, “suggested an unusual degree of self-possession; in the middle of a happy scene, the others might act out mirth, but her reaction would be more one of regarding it, recognizing it. Her job as an actress wasn’t to lead us in the proper reaction. It was to observe its reality.”

At a time when actors were used to histrionics and over-the-top gesturing to make a point, Brooks was one of the first to understand that such efforts weren’t necessary when everything you did could be seen on a giant screen. As a result, she was one of the first movie actresses to play human beings as human.

She stayed in Germany to make 1930’s social drama Diary of a Lost Girl, a stew of lust and betrayal based on a 1905 novel. The film was panned in Germany (critics took exception to it being the third such adaptation of Margaret Bohme’s book) and wasn’t even shown in the U.S. until the 1950s. Today, it is considered another classic, the last great silent film.

By this time, talking pictures were the future, and Paramount had decided to add sound to The Canary Murder Case. Brooks refused the studio’s entreaty to come back to the states and dub her dialogue. Her recalcitrance — along with her declining to play the female lead in James Cagney’s breakthrough film Public Enemy — signaled the beginning of the end of her Hollywood career.

She stayed in Europe to make her first talkie, 1930’s Prix de Beaute (her speaking voice was dubbed by a French actress) before returning to the states, where she’d been promised a contract at Columbia Pictures. Upon her return, she found herself shunned by producers and directors who claimed she was difficult and had a voice that didn’t work in the world of talking pictures. As a result, her first film upon returning to the states was Windy Riley Goes Hollywood, a 20-minute comedy short directed (under a pseudonym) by disgraced silent comic Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle.

The films that followed did her no great favors; she made a fleeting appearance in 1931’s It Pays to Advertise (the final film under her Paramount contract) and had a supporting role in the musical comedy God’s Gift to Women (directed by future screen legend Michael Curtiz).

A disenchanted Brooks went back to her first love and toured the country as a ballroom dancer. It would be another five years before she appeared in another film, a 1936 vehicle for cowboy star Buck Jones called Empty Saddles.

By 1937, the writing was on the wall as far as movies were concerned; her part in the crime drama King of Gamblers was cut, and as part of a chorus line in Cary Grant’s When You’re in Love, she didn’t even merit a screen credit. After playing John Wayne’s love interest in the 1938 western Overland Stage Raiders, Brooks was finished with Hollywood — and vice versa.

Once again, Brooks turned to dance, opening a studio of her own in Hollywood before giving up on the place and moving back to Wichita. To her dismay, Brooks recalled that upon her return, “The citizens of Wichita either resented my being a success or despised me for being a failure.”

Finally, she moved back to New York City, working briefly for columnist Walter Winchell and eventually taking a job at a salesgirl in a department store. It was a humbling finish for the one-time screen sensation — or it would have been, had her story ended there.

Instead, she met film historian James Card, who invited her to the George Eastman House to pore over their film collection. Watching numerous films (including her own) inspired her to begin writing about Hollywood and the people who made it a fascinating place to live. Her witty and sometimes heartbreaking writings (she described dancing with Arbuckle as like “getting a hug from a big round donut”) appeared in numerous film magazines and inspired a new generation of historians to fill in the life story of this lost girl.

After struggling for years in poverty and obscurity (while also suffering from degenerative osteoarthritis), Brooks had emerged triumphant late in life as an entertaining and knowing observer of the Hollywood scene. When British critic Kenneth Tynan spoke to her for a 1979 New Yorker article, she chided him by saying “You’re doing a terrible thing to me. I’ve been killing myself off for twenty years, and you’re going to bring me back to life.”

In fact, she brought herself back to life with her 1982 memoir, Lulu in Hollywood, a series of autobiographical essays in which she highlighted her rise to fame and recalled friends and colleagues like W.C. Fields, Humphrey Bogart and Greta Garbo. She had lived a soap opera existence, one that had as many ups and downs as it had twists and turns. She could have achieved so much more, but for a pattern of self-defeating antics that sent her from stardom to obscurity.

Indeed, it’s sad to think that Brooks ultimately thought of herself as a failure. In a letter to her brother, she thought about her life after leaving home at 15. “How I have existed fills me with horror. For I have failed in everything... And I do not excuse myself with the usual escape of not trying. I tried with all my heart.”

That heart gave out on August 8, 1985; Louise Brooks was 78. Yet in the ensuing years, countless models and actresses have been inspired by the look Brooks cultivated a century ago. One suspects that Brooks the dancer would have appreciated the tributes paid to her in song, including records by the British band Orchestral Manoeuvers in the Dark and American singer-songwriter Natalie Merchant.

She’s also appeared as a character in the fictional output of such modern-day writers as Roddy Doyle, Audrey Niffenegger and Salman Rushdie. Cartoonist (and fellow Kansan) Rick Geary made Brooks the heroine of his 2015 graphic novel Louise Brooks, Detective. Laura Moriarty’s 2012 bestselling novel The Chaperone — a fictionalized account of Brooks’ leaving home at 15 to join the Denishawn Dance Company — was later made into a film, with young Louise played by Haley Lu Richardson.

Given the trajectory of her career and the time when it peaked, it wouldn’t have been surprising had Brooks and her legacy simply vanished from sight. Instead, she’s more present than ever, preserved and remembered as the quintessential flapper girl with a unique and fearless (if sometimes self-destructive) spirit, one with strength of character and a willingness to take a chance. Countless generations owe her a debt of thanks.

Served on a silver salver, of course.

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