Louise Brooks: A Life in Pictures

"There is no Garbo! There is no Dietrich! There is only Louise Brooks!"

- Henri Langlois, co-founder of the Cinémathèque Française, 1955

When Langlois said that, Louise Brooks had been gone from the movies for nearly twenty years and was living in obscurity. Today the black helmet of hair, the level unblinking stare, and the two dozen films she left behind have made her one of the most instantly recognizable faces of the twentieth century - and one of the most misunderstood.

From Kansas to the Ziegfeld Follies

She left Cherryvale, Kansas for New York at fifteen, danced her way onto Broadway, and was a showgirl in the Ziegfeld Follies before she was nineteen. A Paramount contract followed almost immediately. Within four years she had walked out on Hollywood altogether.

The performance that changed screen acting

In 1929 Brooks went to Berlin to play Lulu in G. W. Pabst's Pandora's Box. While her contemporaries were still signalling emotion to the back row, she did almost nothing - and everything registered. Innocence, appetite, cruelty and boredom crossed her face without a single theatrical gesture. Critics panned her at the time. A century later hers is the performance that still looks modern. Diary of a Lost Girl followed the same year.

The disappearance, and the return

Brooks refused to come back for sound retakes on The Canary Murder Case, and the studios closed ranks. Bit parts, then nothing. The money ran out. By the 1940s she was selling clothes behind a counter at Saks Fifth Avenue. Then French archivists and a Rochester film curator rediscovered her in the 1950s, and Brooks - reliably the most intelligent person in any room she had been thrown out of - spent her last decades writing about it. Those essays became Lulu in Hollywood, one of the sharpest and least sentimental memoirs anyone has written about the studio era.

What's inside

• Over 100 photographs, many in color - studio portraits, film stills, magazine covers and candid images spanning her entire career
• A large-format 8.5 x 11 edition, 122 pages, reproduced at 300 dpi - printed big enough to see what the camera actually caught
• A complete filmography, 1925 to 1938, all twenty-four titles
• An introduction tracing how a discarded actress became a permanent icon

For readers who love classic cinema and old Hollywood biography, and for anyone drawn to the brilliant, difficult women who refused to behave. A book to keep out where people can pick it up. Louise Brooks was never anybody's ingenue, and never wanted to be.