Louise Brooks outstanding trait was a total absence of self pity. She hardly ever stooped to explain let alone apologize for herself. Yet this recluse, this self destroying Hollywood "failure" and good time girl on and off the screen, had a mind as well as a face and figure that shone with unusual luminosity.
          Superficially she finished up like Gloria Swanson's Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard, endlessly watching her old films in Eastman House Rochester, New York. But unlike Norma Desmond, Brooks refused to live in the past. Until her last breath she remained, with quiet defiance, a truly modern woman.
          It almost doesn't matter how "good" an actress Brooks really was. The perennial shop girl in bangs and beret, incandescently vamping men foolish or daring enough to ignore the warning signals that here was a woman who didn't give a damn about the next minute, was simply devastating.
          Admittedly part of her allure came later, when she was rediscovered by film cultists in the 1950s who went the usual male ecstasies about her undefinable "mistery". She wasn't mysterious. She just had an outrageously rare quality of filling with her 92lb body and electrifying face that special empty longing that most men - and some women - would destroy themself to fill.

And the most amazing thing is that while helplessly easing herself into bankruptcy and screen obscurity - almost as if she couldn't care less. She gave birth to another kind of woman, Louise Brooks the "forgotten actress" miracolously reborn without bitterness, shame or regrets.
          At first there was little different about Brooks's career. A pretty, shapely brunette with fine legs, she was a Ziegfeld girl after appearing at 15 with Ruth Saint Denis company. The usual Hollywood contract came up in the mid 1920s with parts in film like Love 'em and leave 'em, Rolled stockings and the girl from Coney Island - flapper movies. Gradually she emerged as a talented actress, expecially in Howard Hawks's A girl in every port and Wellman's Beggars of life.
          But Brooks lazily preferred being the "kept woman" of a millionaire laundry king named George Marshall who idolized her. When she got bored with his nagging her to make more movies she simply got some other rich dodo to keep her. Her career dwindled to almost nothing.
          But in 1929 the German director G. W. Pabst, a friend of George Marshall's, told him about a film version he was preparing of Wedekind's sleazy Pandora's box, Marshall hustled the star role of the nymphomaniac Lulu for Brooks, who was enthusiastic until she met Pabst and read the script.
          Something miracolous happened. She was sensational as the amoral, sadomasochistic Lulu whose chief day - dream was to be raped and murdered by an insane monster (Brooks won the role over a supposedly ageing Dietrich). The sated Berliners adored Brooks who quickly followed by in Pabst's Diary of a lost girl.

After completing these two erotic masterpieces Brooks wandered listlessly back to Hollywood but basically she had lost interest. And Hollywood, changing over to sound, couldn't cope with her special needs and nature. She retired from the screen in 1931 to dance in nightclubs, and make a few B - westerns with Buck Jones.
          In late 1950s the late Henri Langlois, curator of the Cinemateque Française, rediscovered Brooks's films. She became a high cult figure, culminating in Kenneth Tynan's New Yorker profile of her, followed by her only book, a memoir, Lulu in Hollywood.
          Crippled by arthritis, but still hantingly beautiful in her seventies and her mind as crisply unself pitying as ever, Brooks moved to Rochester where most of her 25 or so films survived in the Eastman Museum.
          In her last years she enjoyed talking about movies and writing about them with shrewd intelligence. Officially she was married only once, to director Eddie Sutherland, and had no children. She died as she live, without apologies.