Louise Brooks

[Subdeacon Joe]

From FB:

 

"At the age of fifteen, Louise Brooks began her career as a dancer and toured with the Denishawn School of Dancing and Related Arts. After being fired, she found employment as a chorus girl in "George White's Scandals" and as a semi-nude dancer in the Ziegfeld Follies in New York City. While dancing in the Follies, Brooks came to the attention of Walter Wanger, a producer at Paramount Pictures, and was signed to a five-year contract with the studio.

Dissatisfied with her mediocre roles in Hollywood films, Brooks went to Germany in 1929 and starred in three feature films which launched her to international stardom: "Pandora's Box" (1929), "Diary of a Lost Girl" (1929), and "Miss Europe" (1930); the first two were directed by G. W. Pabst.

Brooks recalled that "when we made 'Pandora's Box', Mr. Pabst was a man of 43 who astonished me with his knowledge on practically any subject. I, who astonished him because I knew practically nothing on every subject, celebrated my twenty-second birthday with a beer party on a London street."

Brooks claimed her experience shooting "Pandora's Box" in Germany was a pleasant one: "In Hollywood, I was a pretty flibbertigibbet whose charm for the executive department decreased with every increase in my fan mail. In Berlin I stepped to the station platform to meet Mr. Pabst and became an actress. And his attitude was the pattern for all. Nobody offered me humorous or instructive comments on my acting. Everywhere I was treated with a kind of decency and respect unknown to me in Hollywood. It was just as if Mr. Pabst had sat in on my whole life and career and knew exactly where I needed assurance and protection."

When audiences and critics first viewed Brooks' German films, they were bewildered by her naturalistic acting style. Viewers purportedly exited the theater vocally complaining, "She doesn't act! She does nothing!" In the late 1920s, cinemagoers were habituated to theatre-style stage acting with exaggerated body language and facial expressions. Yet Brooks' acting style was deliberately subtle as she knew the close-up images of the actors' bodies and faces made such exaggerations unnecessary. When explaining her acting method, Brooks posited that acting "does not consist of descriptive movement of face and body but in the movements of thought and soul transmitted in a kind of intense isolation." This innovative style continues to be used today by film actors but, at the time, it was surprising to viewers who assumed she wasn't acting at all.

Film critic Roger Ebert later noted that, by employing this acting method, "Brooks became one of the most modern and effective of actors, projecting a presence that could be startling."

The result of her appearances in the two films by Pabst was that Brooks' became an international star. According to the film critic and historian Molly Haskell, the films "expos[ed] her animal sensuality and turn[ed] her into one of the most erotic figures on the screen—the bold, black-helmeted young girl who, with only a shy grin to acknowledge her 'fall,' became a prostitute in 'Diary of a Lost Girl' and who, with no more sense of sin than a baby, drives men out of their minds in 'Pandora's Box'."
Brooks is regarded today as a Jazz Age icon and as a flapper sex symbol due to her bob hairstyle that she helped popularize during the prime of her career. (Wikipedia)

Happy Birthday, Louise Brooks!"