‘Pandora’s Box’ Cult Figure : Silent Film Star Louise Brooks, 78, Dies

Silent film star Louise Brooks, a cult figure in Europe and the United States who shunned Hollywood after appearing in two dozen films in the 1920s and ‘30s, has died of a heart attack. She was 78.

Brooks was found dead Thursday in her small apartment. The frail woman had been bedridden with arthritis and emphysema.

Brooks’ films have become mainstays at silent film festivals, and her memoirs, “Lulu in Hollywood,” earned critical acclaim when they were published in 1982.

Best known for her trademark black-helmet coiffure, Brooks played the quintessential flapper, Lulu, in her 1929 film, “Pandora’s Box,” whose rediscovery after the publication of her memoirs spawned the cult following.

Her film debut was in 1925, and her career spanned 13 years and 24 movies, ending with the 1938 John Wayne film, “Overland Stage Riders.”

The daughter of a Kansas lawyer, she began her career as a dancer while still in her teens. She appeared on stage in New York in the Ziegfeld Follies and in George White’s Scandals.

“I learned to act while watching Martha Graham dance, and I learned to move in film from watching Chaplin,” she once said.

Brooks, known for her independence and open contempt for the American film industry, later said her intelligence and seriousness were handicaps as she pursued a film career.

“I found myself looked upon as a literary wonder because I read books,” she recalled in her memoirs.

Of Hollywood, she later wrote, “There was no other occupation in the world that so closely resembled enslavement as the career of a film star.”

In the late 1920s, she went to Europe, where German director G. W. Pabst starred her in “Pandora’s Box” and its sequel, “Diary of a Lost Girl.”

On her return to Hollywood, she appeared only in minor roles, including a bit part in “The Public Enemy” in 1931, and retired after making minor westerns.

Brooks moved to Rochester in 1958 at the urging of James Card, curator of the Eastman film archives, and wrote occasional articles about her career for film publications.

She was married for a few years in the mid-1920s to Eddie Sutherland, who directed her in “It’s the Old Army Game” with W. C. Fields.