Louise Brooks : film icon, fashion setter, influencer... Wichitan

"When Hollywood bored her, she walked out on Hollywood, ah,
when men bored her, she walked out on them." - Kenneth Tynan, one of the more famous theatrical critics of the 20th Century.

Louise Brooks, the stunning movie actress and tastemaker's presence in the ’20s & ’30s made women everywhere want to chop their hair as she created the bold and wildly popular “flapper girl” movement. Louise Brooks’ dark and exotic looks drew a throng of faithful followers that continues even to this day.

“A well dressed woman, even though her purse is painfully empty, can conquer the world.”
- Louise Brooks

Louise Brooks was known to be strongly independent, and disliked by Hollywood’s elite for not always being the submissive woman expected of her (the "metoo" movement owes much to her pioneering attitude and "voice"). A beautiful woman who was as smart as she was attractive seemingly posed a substantive threat to the male-dominated movie industry in Hollywood (100 years later, it seems change may have finally arrived).

The critic David Thomson once wrote of Brooks:

The bare facts of her life suggest a true recklessness with herself and her career, borne of a sharp, antagonistic intelligence, a taste for biting wit and – being difficult… She’d made pictures, but she was not a big star of the silent era. In Germany she made a masterpiece and one other good picture (Diary of a Lost Girl – which the lazy Louise cult hardly ever sees) and then she came back to Hollywood and made terrible pictures. You see, she wasn’t a natural, or a great talent – except in Pandora’s Box and there, coming right at the end of the silent era, she is so good that she makes us ashamed at giving so much patience to fatuously archaic versions of womanhood as were offered by Lillian Gish, Mary Pickford and Janet Gaynor. Lulu is dangerous, deadly. Brooks understood the role and had done the reading to support it. So in a 1965 essay in Sight and Sound (she is the only film goddess who became a writer about film!), she quoted Wedekind: “Lulu is not a real character, but the personification of primitive sexuality who inspires evil unaware. She plays a purely passive role.

Brooks actually appeared in seventeen silent films and eight sound films although the great majority are pretty well forgotten or lost and she retired from acting in 1938.

After Hollywood, "Brooksie" returned to Wichita, Kansas, where she opened and operated a dance studio. This, in the early 1940s, and she even published a small tome on technique, but left once again when certain elitist locals' hypocrisies, indignities and jealousies made her life veritably intolerable. She later worked as a radio actor, also as a columnist and writer.
Louise Brooks died in 1985.

“And so I have remained, in relentless pursuit of truth and excellence, an unforgiving executioner of the bogus, an abomination to all but those few people who have overcome their aversion to truth in order to free whatever is good in them.”
- Louise Brooks

Today, Louise Brooks is rightly lauded as one of the first naturalistic actors in film who played more to the subtle than the melodramatic.

“The great art of films does not consist of descriptive movement of face and body, but in the movements of thought and soul transmitted in a kind of intense isolation.”
- Louise Brooks

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