Louise Brooks - anniversary
thomas gladysz
star Louise Brooks, I have posted a bibliography of obituaries and
tribute articles. This webpage can be found at
http://www.pandorasbox.com/louisebrooks/biblio/obit-biblio.html
Gathered there are obituaries from newspapers and magazines across the
United States, as well as England, France, Germany, Spain and
Switzerland. Some of the citations are linked to full-text articles.
This page is a work in progress! If you know of other obituaries or
tribute articles not included on this page, please email whatever
information you might have to the email address found in the header of
this posting.
[Don't forget to remove the anti-spam REMOVE text.]
thomas gladysz
Director, Louise Brooks Society
http://www.pandorasbox.com/
louise_brooksFAN
Film Beauty Dies
By BURT A. FOLKART
Los Angeles Times / Aug 10, 1985
Louise Brooks, a sloe-eyed beauty whose portrayals of wanton women
placed her atop the ranks of reigning silent film queens, but whose
independent spirit forced her to soon give up what she determined was
the "slavery" of acting, has died.
Wire service reports Friday said that the actress had been found dead
in her sparse Rochester, N.Y., apartment where she had lived
reclusively since the late 1950s. She was encouraged to locate there
by a curator of the International Museum of Photography in Rochester.
She was in frail health, suffering from arthritis and emphysema, and a
medical examiner attributed her death Thursday, at age 78, to a heart
attack.
Although she last appeared in films in 1938 (a bit role in "Overland
Stage Raiders" starring John Wayne), she had remained a star to
thousands of fans, many of them in Europe, where her finest work was
done.
Her 1982 autobiographical book, "Lulu in Hollywood," a 1978 profile in
the New Yorker and her recent contributions to film journals made a
current generation aware of not only her enduring sexual allure in
pictures, but of the literary bent that contributed to her decision to
abandon Hollywood after a 24-picture career that began in 1925.
"I found myself looked upon as a literary wonder because I read
books," she wrote in the seven essays that comprised her memoirs.
Her film legacy was a classically patterned face, framed by Dutch
bangs, which were cropped to resemble a bell-shaped hat. The look
became further glorified in the old Dixie Dugan comic strip.
The actress, who would one day write that "my early autonomy"
(attributed to small-town, preoccupied Kansas parents) accounted for
"my later inability when I went to work in the Hollywood film
factories to submit to slavery," began as a dancer in the Ziegfeld
Follies while still in her teens.
"I learned to act while watching Martha Graham dance and I learned to
move in film from watching (Charles) Chaplin," she wrote.
She landed a bit role in "The Street of Forgotten Men" in 1925 and
portrayed a series of vapid flappers in such easily forgotten films as
"The American Venus" and "Now We're in the Air." In 1928 she made "A
Girl in Every Port" and "Beggars of Life," where her acting drew
critical attention.
But the radical change in her career came later that decade when she
left Hollywood for Germany and made two stridently wanton films:
"Pandora's Box" and "Diary of a Lost Girl," both for director G. W.
Pabst.
In the 1929 "Pandora," where a lesbian was first portrayed on screen,
she was Lulu, a nymphomaniac whose desires destroy both a newspaper
publisher and his son. Her insatiable needs lead her to prostitution
and then death at the hands of Jack the Ripper.
In "Diary," also filmed in 1929, she was a rich pharmacist's daughter
whose seduction produced an illegitimate child eventually taking the
film's anti-heroine to a house of corrections and then a brothel.
Her sensuous and perceptive performances in those films and in the
later French picture "Prix de Beaute" were hailed in Europe, but the
guiltless abandon she reflected in those portrayals also made
Hollywood wary of her box-office appeal when she returned to the
United States. She wrote later that Pabst had warned her that the
films might doom her American career.
After a few minor film roles, Miss Brooks returned briefly to dancing
in 1931, then sought work in Hollywood again before leaving the
industry for good in 1938.
She worked in Rochester as a self-described "poor but defiant" sales
clerk before her health failed.
Writer-director Mike Nichols wanted to do a film on her life, but she
rejected that as she did her first try at an autobiography, which she
burned. ("Nobody needs a book of mine to learn how to make a mess of
life.")