Of Thee We Sing, Lulu

Born Mary Louise Brooks on November 14, 1906 in Cherryvale, Kansas, Brooks started her career as a dancer, finding a featured part in 1925's Ziegfield Follies on Broadway. She soon came to the attention of movie people (including Charlie Chaplin) and Paramount signed her to a five year contract in 1925.

Her screen debut was in The Street of Forgotten Men (1925), and she went on to play lead in comedies with Adolphe Menjou and W.C. Fields, among others. But it was with Howard Hawks's A Girl in Every Port (1928) that Louise came to the attention of European director G.W. Pabst who gave her the role of a lifetime in Pandora's Box (1929). She was luminous in the role of Lulu, the flame to which everyone in the film is drawn, and she would bring that quality to Pabst's subsequent Diary of a Lost Girl (1929).

"The great art of films 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." —Louise Brooks

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