Biography
Louise Brooks, also credited as Mary Louise Brooks, was an American actor and dancer. Born in Cherryvale, Kansas, she began her career as a dancer with the Denishawn company and appeared in the Ziegfeld Follies before making her film debut in the mid-1920s.
She rose to prominence in Hollywood films including Beggars of Life (1928). In 1929 she moved to Germany, where she starred as Lulu in G. W. Pabst's Pandora's Box (1929) and as Thymian Henning in Diary of a Lost Girl (1929). These performances established her as a leading figure in silent cinema.
Brooks appeared in further films before retiring from acting in 1938. In later life she wrote essays on film and published the memoir Lulu in Hollywood in 1982. She died in Rochester, New York, in 1985.
