Louise Brooks was born on November 14, 1906, in Cherryvale, Kansas, U.S. She began dancing with the Denishawn Dancers in New York, but was fired due to her quick temper and her attitude of superiority. Still a teenager, she travelled to Europe where she immediately secured employment in a London nightclub, and became famous as
the first person in London to dance the Charleston which was becoming the craze round the world in 1925. She returned to the US the same year, and joined the Ziegfeld Follies on Broadway, and signed a five year contract with
Paramount Studios. Her first film, The Streets of Forgotten Men, gave way to a dozen Hollywood movies, among those: The Canary Murder Case (1929), A Girl in Every Port (1928) and Beggars of Life (1928). Her appearance as a Flapper in the 1926, A Social Celebrity, at the age of 20, introduced the genre and launched her career as a Flapper icon. Soon, her Brown-Page Boy
type haircut started a trend quickly adopted by thousands of women.
With her pale features, Brooks was a beautiful and talented woman who blatantly flaunted the accepted sexual promiscuity of women at the time. But, as a smart, modern female, who loved reading books, she was
not especially favored among Hollywood's elite. She did not mix well with the norms of the film society. Dissatisfied with the Hollywood scene, she broke her contract with Paramount after 21 silent pictures and left again for
Europe. By then, her performances had attracted the attention of the German director G.W. Pabst, and she was cast as the amoral, self-destructive temptress Lulu in the 1929, Pandora’s Box, and as the 16 year-old girl who is seduced and prostituted in Pabst’s 1929, Diary of a Lost Girl.
Brooks returned to the US in 1930, but her frankness and
intellectual sassiness repeatedly brought her into conflict with the studios for she refused to accept the restrictive role that women had in American society. Fed-up with Hollywood, she quit films altogether in 1938, at the peak of her career, but she remained one of the most alluring and fascinating actress, who “personified the rebellious young woman of the 1920’s known as a Flapper” [IMDb].
Later in her life, she wrote for film journals, became an accomplished writer, and published her memoir, Lulu in Hollywood in 1982. She died, three years later, of a heart attack at the age of 78 in Rochester, New York. Dramatic homages have been paid to Brooks, dubbed then the Jazz Age Girl, as she was rediscovered in 1950 through some of her few surviving films. In 1995, The Louise Brooks Society was launched with the aim to honor the actress “by stimulating interest in her life and films.”
Today, she is a cult figure, and will continue to influence women for years to come.
Louise Brooks
35 | Ceres Magazine | Oct/Nov 2015
Famous Flappers
Louise Brooks and Clara Bow, two of the movie stars who helped shape the twenties' style, but also
character, and morals, making a difference for millions of women.