Arena Season 1, Episode 272

Louise Brooks · BBC Four · Tuesday, February 18

The American film actress Louise Brooks, who died last summer, was one of the most celebrated beauties in the history of the cinema. Her performance as unrepentant pleasure-seeker Lulu in G.W. Pabst's Pandora's Box made her a legend. KENNETH TYNAN wrote: 'She has run through my life like a magnetic thread, this shameless urchin tomboy ... a temptress with no pretentions, amoral but totally selfless.' Louise Brooks's own life had more than a touch of Lulu's reckless abandon about it. In tonight's Arena, she talks candidly about her greatest days in Paris and Berlin and of the harsh retribution that was exacted by Hollywood. With rare clips from her varied screen performances.