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Louise Brooks was born Mary Louise Brooks in 1906, and she was always unconventional. She was the daughter of a Kansas lawyer, but she left at the age of 16 to go to New York and join Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn with their Denishawn dancers. Two years later she had a falling out with Shawn and was fired. She then worked in the George White's Scandals, the Ziegfeld Follies (where she was a semi-nude dancer, and was noticed, and signed to a Hollywood contract by Paramount Pictures, where she had several minor movies as a sexy flapper girl in comedies). She finally got her big break in a starring role in Beggars Of Life, and predictably she left Hollywood to go to Europe. But she had had the title role in The Canary Murder Case in 1929, which had been filmed as a silent, and Paramount asked her to return to dub the movie, and she refused, which effectively blacklisted her in Hollywood. She made two incredible movies with legendary German director G.W. Pabst, Pandora's Box, and Diary Of A Lost Girl and I highly recommend both. She made Prix de Beaute in France, and in the early 1930s she returned to Hollywood (minus her trademark flapper hairdo) where she could only get minor roles, and she returned to Kansas, and later New York. She lived an alcoholic life in obscurity (supported by former admirers including William S. Paley, founder of CBS). In the 1950s and 1960s she was "rediscovered" by film critics, and she wrote many articles and books about her life, which I also highly recommend. She is likely best remembered for her distinctive hair style! She passed away in 1985 at the age of 78.

Important Added Info: Note that our consignor tells us that this wonderful image originated from the Brown Brothers press archive, which had the original White Studios glass negative that it used to make prints from. They made this film negative from a positive print that had been created from the glass negative, which later broke. They then made additional prints from this negative in the 1920s and 1930s. So while this is not the negative taken by the photographer, it is a film negative created in the 1920s or 1930s, directly from a vintage print. Please remember that what you are bidding on is a vintage negative. We will give the winning bidder (and only the winning bidder) the high quality positive scan that we made of this negative, upon request (which can be used to make high quality prints).

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