Jean Brooks

Early life

Brooks was born Ruby M. Kelly on December 23, 1915 in Houston, Texas, the fourth child of Horace and Robina Kelly. Through her mother, Brooks was of English and Canadian descent. Her two older brothers, Horace Jr. and Ernest, were both teenagers at the time she was born; a third son had died in 1912 at age seven of tetanus.

Brooks spent her early years in Texas but after her father's death during her childhood, she and her mother relocated to Costa Rica, her mother's native country. There, they lived on Brooks' grandfather's coffee plantation. As a result, Brooks was binlingual, fluent in both English and Spanish. During her teenage years, Brooks relocated with her mother to New York City, with plans to attend college.

Beginnings

Brooks would begin her professional career as a singer at New York City's Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, where she sang in Enric Madriguera's orchestra. She adopted the name Jeanne Kelly for her entertainment career. With the help of Erich von Stroheim, whom Brooks had met while working at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, she began her acting career. Her first screen role was in the Arcturus Pictures release Obeah! (1935), a film about Obeah curses.

After having bit parts in Frankie and Johnnie and Tango-Bar (both 1935), she starred alongside von Stroheim in The Crime of Dr. Crespi (1935). Brooks parted ways with von Stroheim some time after Crespi. She then acted in the stage melodrama Name Your Poison, opposite Lenore Ulrich, which premiered at the Sam S. Shubert Theatre in Newark, New Jersey on January 20, 1936.

In 1938, Brooks attempted to get back into film acting. After a failed screen test with 20th Century Fox, and the collapse of Major Productions (who had signed Brooks three weeks before going out of business), she signed a contract to star in Spanish language films for Paramount Pictures. She landed two starring roles with Paramount, acting under the stage name Robina Duarte.

After the Paramount contract, Brooks spent another year taking bit parts. In 1940, she landed a contract with Universal Studios, and appeared in chapter five of the film serial Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe (1940) as Olga. After more bit parts and small roles, Brooks was awarded with her first leading role in a feature film, playing Laura in The Devil's Pipeline in 1940. Her performance was not well received: Variety described her as "flat." Universal never gave her star treatment, preferring instead to cast her in small roles and B-movies.

RKO films

In 1941, Jean met and married writer and future film director Richard Brooks. (Though this is known to have been her second marriage, there is no information on her first. It is rumored to have been to Erich von Stroheim.) Shortly thereafter, Universal dropped Brooks' contract. She spent most of 1942 working bit parts, now performing under the name Jean Brooks. It is likely that she adopted her husband's name as a stage name because dancer Gene Kelly began acting in films in 1942.

In 1943, she signed a contract with RKO Radio Pictures. At RKO, Brooks was to achieve her greatest success, though stardom eluded her. She appeared in six of The Falcon mystery movies, and was cast in two Val Lewton-produced horror classics, as the heroine Kiki Walker in Jacques Tourneur's The Leopard Man, and as the depressed devil-worshipper Jacqueline Gibson in The Seventh Victim, this latter role being the one for which she is most widely remembered today.

It is a sad coincidence (and perhaps part of the film's success) that, while portraying the depressed Jacqueline, Brooks' own life was falling apart. During the filming of The Seventh Victim, Brooks had separated from her husband. She and Richard Brooks divorced in 1944. It was also widely rumored that she had begun drinking heavily. (Cecilia Maskell, the daughter of Brooks' cousin, Gloria White, has remarked that alcoholism runs in the family).

Alcoholism and retirement

Though Brooks continued to land prominent roles with RKO throughout 1944, most notably The Falcon and the Co-eds and Lewton's juvenile delinquency film Youth Runs Wild, her career unraveled. RKO began casting her in smaller and smaller roles, and she was noticeably gaining weight. She arrived at the September 1945 premiere of First Yank into Tokyo drunk; Kurt Crivello, a film historian who was at the premiere, described her appearance: "Jean Brooks, sad to say, was smashed. She was very, very drunk; she must have been drinking all night on the train ... some of the people there were laughing at her. Anne Jeffreys and Jane Greer looked so embarrassed. It was really very sad."

In other instances, Brooks would reportedly pass out in public. By 1946, Brooks's struggles with alcoholism and her disheveled public appearances resulted in friction with RKO executives, and Brooks reportedly tore up her contract before they could fire her. Her final film with RKO was the war drama The Bamboo Blonde, released in July 1946. Two years later, Brooks made her final screen appearance in the William Rowland-directed drama Women in the Night (1948).

Personal life

In 1946, Brooks met newly returned Marine Corps veteran, William Douglas Lansford, and they married. The marriage lasted 10 years, most of which were spent while Lansford was back in the armed forces (Army) and they were stationed at various bases in the U.S. It was a happy time for her while she formed amateur theater groups and worked in productions along with her husband who was a writer, at the various places they were stationed. But alcoholism persisted. Lansford, too, was a heavy drinker and soon it overwhelmed the marriage. They were divorced in 1956 and Lansford remarried to Ruth Ketcham of Long Island, New York.

In the mid-1950s, Brooks married San Francisco Examiner editor Thomas H. Leddy, to whom she was married until her death. A Protestant, Brooks converted to Roman Catholicism upon her marriage to Leddy in 1956.

Death

In November 1963, Brooks was admitted to Kaiser Richmond Field Hospital in Richmond, California, suffering from complications resulting from Laennec's Cirrhosis, which she had lived with for the past five years. On November 25, 1963, she fell into a hepatic coma, and died of the condition at 6:35 p.m. Her death certificate noted that she had suffered from "nutritional inadequacy" for 15 years, probably stemming from her alcoholism.

She was buried at sea the following year, on September 10, 1964. Her burial was reported in the papers in Costa Rica, though there were no obituaries, and apparently no knowledge of her death in Hollywood; her ex-husband, Richard Brooks, reportedly died in 1992 with no knowledge of her death.

On August 7, 1990, 27 years after Brooks's death, the following appeared in The Hollywood Reporter: "Anyone know the whereabouts of Jean Brooks? Once married to director Richard Brooks, thus her name, she was aka Jeanne Kelly and under contract to both Universal and RKO in the 1940s ... Even Richard B[rooks] and several of the actress' former pals say they've lost all contact with her whereabouts."