Louise Brooks

With exotic good looks and a bobbed hairstyle she originated, actress Louise Brooks made a number of films during the silent era and the advent of sound, only to drop off the public radar after adamantly refusing to bow down to studio pressures. Brooks started her showbiz career as a dancer for Denishawn and the Ziegfeld Follies, the latter of which led to a brief romance with silent star Charlie Chaplin, before making her film debut in 1925. She graduated to leading roles with "It's the Old Army Game" (1926), "A Girl in Every Port" (1927) and "Beggars Life" (1928), but was unable to achieve stardom. After leaving Hollywood in 1928, Brooks settled in Germany where she made her three best pictures, "Pandora's Box" (1929), "Diary of a Lost Girl" (1929), and "Prix de Beauté" (1930). The first introduced audiences to her most iconic character, Lulu, a woman who brings destruction to herself and those who love her. "Pandora's Box" garnered Brooks international stardom that ultimately proved short-lived. She returned to Hollywood in 1931 and landed several movies, but again struggled. Brooks made her last movie, "Overland Stage Raiders" (1938), before going back East. With the help of film curator James Card, Brooks found a second life as a writer and eventually published a number of witty essays, culminating in her memoirs Lulu in Hollywood (1982) and a rediscovery of her importance to the silent era of cinema.