Brooks

Louise Brooks (1906-1985) was an american actress. She was an icon who influenced fashion, comics, and cinema with a face framed by the neat cut of her black hair. With bangs, deep eyes, and pearly complexion, she was a very beautiful Lulù at the end of the 1920s, in an intense though short appearance. Success arrived after two films shot in Germany thanks to George Wilhelm Pabst, who wanted her as the disturbing main characters of Pandora’s Box (1928), and Das Tagebuch einer Verlorenen (1929). There were more films, of little importance, which didn’t last, this time shot in Hollywood. But suddenly during the 1930s she was taken as a model for the character of Dixie Dugan in the comic strip of the same name by John Striebel. Guido Crepax was inspired by her to invent his Valentina. Other cinematographic tributes came from Godard who, in Vivre sa vie (1962) used the Louise Brooks hairdo for his protagonist Anna Karina; and from Bob Fosse in Cabaret (1972), when he used her “look” as the basis for the character Sally Bowles, played by Liza Minelli. That same hairdo, but in red, was given to the singer Milva by Giorgio Strehler for the character of Pirate Jenny in a new production of Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera at the Piccolo Teatro dell’Opera.