(Mary) Louise Brooks was an American actress in the silent era whose beautifully coiffed bobbed haircut started a trend in the twenties. Kansas born, Louise started her career as a dancer (George White’s Scandals and Ziegfeld’s Follies) and was soon spotted and signed by Paramount in 1925. After a series of successful silents, Louise walked out on Paramount over a wage dispute and went to Germany, where she made her most famous film, Pandora’s Box, with Austrian filmmaker, G. W. Pabst. Upon her return to Hollywood, she was essentially black-listed, a fact that seemed not to matter to her, as she claimed to have loathed the town anyway. Louise spent the remainder of her career, until 1938, playing bit parts and acting in un-credited roles. She briefly returned to Wichita, Kansas, and finally wound up in New York, where she worked as a clerk at Saks Fifth Avenue. She enjoyed a revival in the fifties after being rediscovered by French filmmakers, and then again in the eighties, when American film historians sought her out and interviewed her in depth on film. Louise married twice, briefly, and had no children. An affair with William Paley, the founder of CBS, netted her a small stipend; she lived alone and modestly until her death, shortly after publishing her memoir, Lulu in Hollywood. Today Louise Brooks is a cult figure, looked up to by thousands who never heard of other silent stars, as an icon of reckless independence and open sexuality in an age that frowned upon anything of the sort for women.
