Born Mary Louise Brooks in Cherryvale, Kansas. She began her entertainment career as a dancer, appearing with the Ziegfeld Follies as well as the Denishawn dance company whose members included Martha Graham and Ted Shawn. Her film debut was in The Street of Forgotten Men in an uncredited role in 1925, but she became famous for the 1928 film Pandora's Box, in which her waiflike role as the doomed flapper Lulu made her an icon of the Jazz Age. Her pageboy haircut started a trend, as women in the Western world cut their hair like hers.
After the humiliation of being cast in B pictures by studio executives as punishment for her outspokenness and disdain for ill-written scripts, in 1938, she retired from show business, briefly returning to Wichita, where she was raised. "But that turned out to be another kind of hell," she wrote. "The citizens of Wichita either resented me having been a success or despised me for being a failure. And I wasn't exactly enchanted with them. I must confess to a lifelong curse: My own failure as a social creature."
She returned East and worked as a sales girl in a Saks store in New York City. French film historians rediscovered her living in Rochester, New York in the 1950s, and with the help of such film writers as William Paley and Kenneth Tynan, she became a writer in her own right. A collection of her writings, Lulu in Hollywood, was published in 1982.
She was married twice. Her first husband was cameraman Edward Sutherland; they later divorced. Her second husband was Chicago millionaire Deering Davis; they married in 1933, Deering left her five months later, and they divorced in 1937.
Filmography includes
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