Mary Louise Brooks was an American film actress and dancer during the 1920s and 1930s.
47 Facts About Louise Brooks
2.
Louise Brooks is regarded today as an icon of the Jazz Age and flapper culture, in part due to the bob hairstyle that she helped popularize during the prime of her career.
3.
At the age of 15, Brooks began her career as a dancer and toured with the Denishawn School of Dancing and Related Arts where she performed opposite Ted Shawn.
4.
Louise Brooks appeared in supporting roles in various Paramount films before taking the heroine's role in Beggars of Life.
5.
Louise Brooks published her memoir, Lulu in Hollywood, in 1982.
6.
Louise Brooks began her entertainment career as a dancer, joining the Denishawn School of Dancing and Related Arts modern dance company in Los Angeles at the age of 15 in 1922.
7.
Louise Brooks included founders Ruth St Denis and Ted Shawn, as well as a young Martha Graham.
8.
Louise Brooks was 17 years old at the time of her dismissal.
9.
Chaplin and Louise Brooks had a two-month affair that summer while Chaplin was married to Lita Grey.
10.
Louise Brooks made her screen debut in the silent The Street of Forgotten Men, in an uncredited role in 1925.
11.
At the time, Louise Brooks had an on-and-off affair with Walter Wanger, head of Paramount Pictures and husband of actress Justine Johnstone.
12.
Amid these tensions, Louise Brooks repeatedly clashed with Wellman, whose risk-taking directing style nearly killed her in a scene where she recklessly climbs aboard a moving train.
13.
Louise Brooks was a frequent house guest of media magnate William Randolph Hearst and his mistress Marion Davies at Hearst Castle in San Simeon, being intimate friends with Davies's lesbian niece, Pepi Lederer.
14.
Louise Brooks traveled to Europe accompanied by Marshall and his English valet.
15.
The film Pandora's Box is based on two plays by Frank Wedekind, and Louise Brooks plays the central figure, Lulu.
16.
In performing Diary of a Lost Girl, Louise Brooks drew upon on her memories of being molested as a 9-year-old and then being blamed by her mother for her own molestation, later recalling on that day she became one of the "lost".
17.
Louise Brooks further cautioned Brooks that Marshall and her "rich American friends" would likely shun her when her career stalled.
18.
Louise Brooks's acting style was subtle because she understood that the close-up images of the actors' bodies and faces made such exaggerations unnecessary.
19.
Louise Brooks has been a sensational hit in her German pictures.
20.
Dissatisfied with Europe, Louise Brooks returned to New York in December 1929.
21.
Louise Brooks turned down Wellman's offer in order to visit Marshall in New York City, and the coveted role instead went to Jean Harlow, who then began her own rise to stardom.
22.
Louise Brooks returned to Hollywood after being offered of a $500 weekly salary from Columbia Pictures but, after refusing to do a screen test for a Buck Jones Western film, the contract offer was withdrawn.
23.
Louise Brooks made one more film at that time, a two-reel comedy short, Windy Riley Goes Hollywood, directed by disgraced Hollywood outcast Fatty Arbuckle, who worked under the pseudonym "William Goodrich".
24.
Louise Brooks declared bankruptcy in 1932, and began dancing in nightclubs to earn a living.
25.
Louise Brooks attempted a film comeback in 1936 and did a bit part in Empty Saddles, a Western that led Columbia to offer her a screen test, contingent on appearing in the 1937 musical When You're in Love, uncredited, as a specialty ballerina in the chorus.
26.
Louise Brooks made two more films after that, including the 1938 Western Overland Stage Raiders in which she played the romantic lead opposite John Wayne, with a long hairstyle that rendered her all but unrecognizable from her Lulu days.
27.
In contemporary reviews of the film in newspapers and trade publications, Louise Brooks received little attention from critics.
28.
Soon Louise Brooks found herself unemployed and increasingly desperate for a steady income.
29.
Between 1948 and 1953, Louise Brooks embarked upon a career as a courtesan with a few select wealthy men as clients.
30.
Louise Brooks spent subsequent years "drinking and escorting" while subsisting in obscurity and poverty in a small New York apartment.
31.
In 1955, French film historians such as Henri Langlois rediscovered Louise Brooks's films, proclaiming her an unparalleled actress who surpassed even Marlene Dietrich and Greta Garbo as a film icon, much to her purported amusement.
32.
Louise Brooks persuaded her in 1956 to move to Rochester, New York, to be near the George Eastman House film collection where she could study cinema and write about her past career.
33.
Louise Brooks divorced Sutherland, mainly due to her budding relationship with Marshall, in June 1928.
34.
Sutherland was purportedly extremely distraught when Louise Brooks divorced him and, on the first night after their separation, he attempted to take his life with an overdose of sleeping pills.
35.
In 1925, Louise Brooks sued the New York glamour photographer John de Mirjian to prevent publication of his risque studio portraits of her; the lawsuit made him notorious.
36.
Sometime in September 1953, Louise Brooks converted to Roman Catholicism, but she left the church in 1964.
37.
Louise Brooks admitted to some lesbian dalliances, including a one-night stand with Greta Garbo.
38.
Louise Brooks later described Garbo as masculine but a "charming and tender lover".
39.
The operative rule with Louise Brooks was neither heterosexuality, homosexuality, or bisexuality.
40.
Since her death in 1985, significant allusions to Louise Brooks have appeared in novels, comics, music, and film.
41.
Louise Brooks has inspired cinematic characters such as Sally Bowles in Bob Fosse's 1972 film Cabaret.
42.
Louise Brooks appears as a central character in the 2012 novel The Chaperone by Laura Moriarty.
43.
In 1987, the Dutch author Willem Frederik Hermans published a book, The Saint of the Clockmakers, in which Louise Brooks plays a role.
44.
Louise Brooks inspired the long-running Dixie Dugan newspaper strip by John H Striebel.
45.
Louise Brooks inspired the erotic comic books of Valentina, by the late Guido Crepax, which began publication in 1965 and continued for many years.
46.
Louise Brooks was the visual model for the character of Ivy Pepper in Tracy Butler's Lackadaisy comic series.
47.
Similarly, Soul Coughing's 1998 song "St Louise Is Listening" contains several references to Brooks, and the song "Interior Lulu" released the next year by Marillion is a reference to Brooks and mentions her in its first lines.