Louise Brooks played Lulu, the central character in the 1929 film Pandora’s Box.
Pandora’s Box is a German silent film directed by Georg Wilhelm Pabst. It stars American actress and dancer Louise Brooks as Lulu, a charismatic woman whose relationships and choices drive the tragic narrative. Brooks’s performance became the defining feature of the film’s later reputation.
The film was adapted from two stage plays by German writer Frank Wedekind: Earth Spirit and Pandora’s Box. Rather than retelling the ancient Greek myth literally, it uses the Pandora name as part of a modern story about desire, social judgment, and destruction.
Brooks’s sharply bobbed hairstyle and controlled screen presence helped make the film an important work of late silent cinema. Although it was not universally celebrated at release, later critics and filmmakers helped establish it as a major example of German film history and as one of Brooks’s signature performances.