Louise Brooks: A Life in Pictures gathers more than a hundred Louise Brooks photographs—studio portraits, film stills, lobby cards, posters and magazine covers—and runs them in order, from a Kansas teenager to the woman whose face became shorthand for an entire decade. It is a picture book rather than a biography, because with Brooks the pictures are a big part of the story.

Table of Contents

From Kansas to the Ziegfeld Follies

Studio portrait of a teenaged Louise Brooks looking back over a bare shoulder, dark hair in an early bob, wearing an embroidered sleeveless dress against a black background — Brooks at 15, before joining the Denishawn Dance Company.

Brooks was born in 1906 in Cherryvale, Kansas. Her father was a hardworking lawyer; her mother was a strong-willed educator who warned her husband-to-be that any children she bore would largely have to fend for themselves. Young Louise showed early promise as a dancer, and as a young teenager moved to New York City to study with the Denishawn company under Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn.

Impressed with her talent, the company hired her. Brooks performed with the young Martha Graham, who became a lifelong friend. “I learned to act while watching Martha Graham dance,” she later said. Brooks did not like the discipline required to dance with Denishawn, and she was fired for “lacking a sense of vocation.”

That attitude—resisting external expectations and falling out of favor as a consequence—came up again and again in her career and led many to conclude she was difficult.

Louise Brooks by Alfred Cheney Johnston — Louise Brooks, by Alfred Cheney Johnston

After Denishawn, she landed in the chorus of George White’s Scandals, and then was cast in the Ziegfeld Follies, both in 1924 and 1925.

Her own account of those years, in the first chapter of Lulu in Hollywood, credits a soda jerk, a waiter and a salesgirl for overcoming her plain-living Kansas ways and with turning her into a confident New Yorker. By her own account she went from teenager awe-struck by the big city to a sophisticated woman who could easily mingle with the rich and famous.

I have written elsewhere about what that chapter says and what it carefully leaves out.

The photos of her as a Ziegfeld girl, shot by the famed Alfred Cheney Johnston, reveal Brooks as provocative and uncommonly beautiful. Unlike many of Johnston’s portraits that feature sitters in relaxed, contemplative poses, his photographs of Brooks are dynamic. She radiates energy and charisma.

Louise Brooks, Actress: Her Film Career

Louise Brooks was an American actress whose silent film career began in 1925, when Paramount signed her after her stage work with the Ziegfeld Follies. Her thirteen-year screen career ranged from Hollywood pictures such as A Girl in Every Port and Beggars of Life to the German classics Pandora’s Box and Diary of a Lost Girl. Her life story followed an unusual arc: early promise, rebellion against the studio system, decades of obscurity, and eventual recognition as one of the silent era’s most modern performers.

A Remarkably Modern Performance as Lulu

Pandora's Box poster with Louise Brooks — German poster for Pandora’s Box, 1929

At Paramount she appeared in more than a dozen films between 1925 and 1929, most of them comedies. She attracted attention but never became a major Hollywood star.

After a dispute with the studio in 1928, she abruptly left New York for Berlin to work with the well-known film director G. W. Pabst. The film she would make, Die Büchse der Pandora (Pandora’s Box), became her most famous and is regarded by many as one of the finest silent films ever made.

The film follows Lulu, a captivating Berlin showgirl whose affair with a wealthy man spirals into scandal and tragedy. After accidentally killing her husband during a struggle, she flees justice and eventually descends into poverty and is murdered by a Jack the Ripper-like character. Brooks made Lulu unforgettable through her startling naturalism: her direct gaze, physical grace, and spontaneous reactions make the character appear simultaneously innocent, sensual, selfish, and emotionally transparent. That combination of moral ambiguity and unaffected screen presence makes the performance remarkably modern.

Back to Hollywood, A Long Decline, and A Revival

Brooks returned to Hollywood in 1931 but struggled to find film roles. Her final screen appearance was in Overland Stage Raiders (1938), opposite John Wayne. In the years that followed, she was variously supported by wealthy lovers, worked as a salesgirl, and ultimately became a near-recluse. During the 1950s, film historians and archivists rediscovered her work, and she took to writing about her career. Her incisive essays appeared in film journals and were collected in Lulu in Hollywood (1982), establishing her reputation as a gifted writer as well as a major silent-film actress. Brooks died of a heart attack in Rochester in 1985 at age seventy-eight.

About the Louise Brooks Photographs in this Book

The book runs 122 pages at 8.5 by 11 inches, with over a hundred images, many of them in color. The images cover the full arc of her performing career, from a teen-aged dancer to acting opposite John Wayne.

An introduction traces her life story, including her remarkable turn late in life as a writer and re-discovered icon of silent film.

A complete filmography lists all twenty-four titles from 1925 to 1938.

Louise Brooks: A Life in Pictures is available from Amazon in paperback and for Kindle.

Please also check out the Ziegfeld Girls and the Birth of Hollywood Glamour, which follows fifty-three women who made the same jump from the Broadway stage to a movie set that Brooks did. More about my work is on the biography page.