[1][2][3] At the age of 15, Brooks began her career as a dancer and toured with the Denishawn School of Dancing and Related Arts where she performed opposite Ted Shawn.

[4] After being fired, she found employment as a chorus girl in George White's Scandals and as a semi-nude[5] dancer in the Ziegfeld Follies in New York City.

That early abuse caused her later to acknowledge that she was incapable of real love, explaining that this man: "must have had a great deal to do with forming my attitude toward sexual pleasure ... For me, nice, soft, easy men were never enough — there had to be an element of domination.

"[32] These words made a strong impression on Brooks; when she drew up an outline for a planned autobiographical novel in 1949, "The Silver Salver" was the title she gave the tenth and final chapter.

[37] Soon she was playing the female lead in a number of silent light comedies and flapper films over the next few years, starring with Adolphe Menjou and W. C. Fields,[30] among others.

[40] During this time, Brooks gained a cult following in Europe for her pivotal vamp role in the 1928 Howard Hawks silent buddy film A Girl in Every Port.

[41] Her distinctive bob haircut helped start a trend, and many women styled their hair in imitation of both her and fellow film star Colleen Moore.

[42][43] In the early sound film drama Beggars of Life (1928), Brooks plays an abused country girl who kills her foster father when he "attempts, one sunny morning, to rape her.

[49] During the production, she had a one-night stand with a stuntman who — the next day — spread a malicious false rumor on the set that Brooks had contracted a venereal disease during a previous weekend stay with a producer,[50][51] ostensibly Jack Pickford.

[53] Amid these tensions, Brooks repeatedly clashed with Wellman, whose risk-taking[54] directing style nearly killed her in a scene where she recklessly[c] climbs aboard a moving train.

"[68] 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.

[71] On the final day of shooting Diary of a Lost Girl, Pabst counseled Brooks not to return to Hollywood and instead to stay in Germany and to continue her career as a serious actress.

According to 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.

[76] When she returned to Hollywood in 1931, she was cast in two mainstream films, God's Gift to Women (1931) and It Pays to Advertise (1931), but her performances were largely ignored by critics, and few other job offers were forthcoming due to her informal "blacklisting".

"[77] Purportedly, Wellman — despite their previous acrimonious relationship on Beggars of Life[45] — offered Brooks the female lead in his new picture The Public Enemy, starring James Cagney.

[78] Brooks turned down Wellman's offer in order to visit Marshall in New York City,[79] and the coveted role instead went to Jean Harlow,[78] who then began her own rise to stardom.

She attempted a film comeback in 1936 and did a bit part in Empty Saddles,[85] a Western that led Columbia to offer her a screen test, contingent on appearing in the 1937 musical When You're in Love, uncredited, as a specialty ballerina in the chorus.

[86] In 1937, Brooks obtained a bit part in the film King of Gamblers after a private interview on a Paramount set with director Robert Florey, who "specialised in giving jobs to destitute and sufficiently grateful actresses.

Brooks made two more films after that, including the 1938 Western Overland Stage Raiders in which she played the romantic lead opposite John Wayne,[88] with a long hairstyle that rendered her all but unrecognizable from her Lulu days.

[11] Recalling this difficult period in her memoirs, Brooks wrote that she frequently pondered suicide: I found that the only well-paying career open to me, as an unsuccessful actress of thirty-six, was that of a call girl ... and (I) began to flirt with the fancies related to little bottles filled with yellow sleeping pills.

[59] Although Brooks had been a heavy drinker since the age of 14,[13] she remained relatively sober to begin writing perceptive essays on cinema in film magazines, which became her second career.

[92][100] In the 1970s, she was interviewed extensively on film for the documentaries Memories of Berlin: The Twilight of Weimar Culture (1976), produced and directed by Gary Conklin, and Hollywood (1980), by Brownlow and David Gill.

[101] In 1979, she was profiled by the film writer Kenneth Tynan in his essay "The Girl in the Black Helmet", the title an allusion to her bobbed hair, worn since childhood.

[104] In 1925, Brooks sued the New York glamour photographer John de Mirjian to prevent publication of his risqué studio portraits of her; the lawsuit made him notorious.

[110][115] Brooks enjoyed fostering speculation about her sexuality,[114] cultivating friendships with lesbian and bisexual women including Pepi Lederer and Peggy Fears, but eschewing relationships.

It was just sexuality ..."[121] On August 8, 1985, after suffering from degenerative osteoarthritis of the hip[65] and emphysema[122] for many years, Brooks died of a heart attack in her apartment in Rochester, New York.

In Nora Ephron's 1994 film Mixed Nuts, Liev Schreiber portrays a character with a strong resemblance to Ms. Brooks for the cut of her hair, her mannerisms and facial expressions.

More recently, in 2018, the PBS film The Chaperone was released, which depicts Brooks's initial arrival in New York and alludes to her career decline as an actress.

[123] Brooks's film persona served as the literary inspiration for Adolfo Bioy Casares when he wrote his science fiction novel The Invention of Morel (1940) about a man attracted to Faustine, a woman who is only a projected 3-D image.

[133] Her key films survive, however, particularly Pandora's Box and Diary of a Lost Girl, which have been released on DVD in North America by the Criterion Collection and Kino Video, respectively.