Louise Brooks Noted for Portrayals of Wanton Women : Rebellious Silent Film Beauty Dies

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 Riders” 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.

Began as a Dancer

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.”)