Who plays Lulu in Georg Wilhelm Pabst’s 1929 film Pandora’s Box?

Louise Brooks plays Lulu in Georg Wilhelm Pabst’s 1929 film Pandora’s Box. Brooks’s performance is the film’s defining feature, and Lulu became her most famous screen role.

Lulu is a compelling and socially disruptive character drawn from Frank Wedekind’s stage works Earth Spirit and Pandora’s Box. The film follows her relationships and the consequences surrounding them, creating a story of desire, obsession, scandal, and violence rather than a literal adaptation of the Greek Pandora myth.

Brooks was an American actress and dancer who worked in Hollywood before making several important films in Europe. Her distinctive bobbed hairstyle and naturalistic screen presence became strongly associated with the late silent-film era.

The film’s title can mislead viewers into expecting ancient Greek mythology. Its connection is primarily thematic and literary: Wedekind’s title and character belong to modern drama, while Pabst’s film uses the title for a twentieth-century story about Lulu.