Description:
Jean Brooks (born Ruby Matilda Kelly; December 23, 1915 – November 25, 1963) was an American film actress and singer who appeared in over thirty films. Though she never achieved major stardom in Hollywood, she had several prominent roles in the early 1940s as a contract player for RKO Radio Pictures.
Born in Houston, Brooks spent her early life in Texas and Costa Rica. She began her career as a club singer and guitarist in New York City before being cast in several minor walk-on parts in films. She would later appear in supporting roles in the Universal Pictures serial productions Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe (19
Jean Brooks (born Ruby Matilda Kelly; December 23, 1915 – November 25, 1963) was an American film actress and singer who appeared in over thirty films. Though she never achieved major stardom in Hollywood, she had several prominent roles in the early 1940s as a contract player for RKO Radio Pictures.
Born in Houston, Brooks spent her early life in Texas and Costa Rica. She began her career as a club singer and guitarist in New York City before being cast in several minor walk-on parts in films. She would later appear in supporting roles in the Universal Pictures serial productions Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe (1940) and The Green Hornet Strikes Again! (1941). In 1942, Brooks signed a contract with RKO and appeared in multiple films by the studio, including Jacques Tourneur's The Leopard Man (1943), Mark Robson's horror noir The Seventh Victim (1943), and drama Youth Runs Wild (1944), as well as several films in the Falcon series.
Her later life and career were marred by struggles with alcoholism, and a series of drunken public appearances resulted in Brooks ending her contract with RKO. In 1948, she made her final film appearance in Women in the Night (1948) before abandoning her career as an actress and relocating to San Francisco, California. She died in 1963 of complications resulting from her alcoholism.
Early life
Brooks was born Ruby Matilda 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 bilingual, fluent in both English and Spanish. During her teenage years, Brooks relocated with her mother to New York City, with plans to attend college.
Career
Beginnings
Brooks began her professional career as a singer at New York City's Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, where she sang and performed as a guitarist in Enric Madriguera's orchestra. She adopted the name Jeanne Kelly for her entertainment career, so as not to be confused with actress Ruby Keeler. 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 Ulric, 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; her fluency in Spanish allowed her to effectively play the parts.
After the Paramount contract was completed, Brooks spent another year taking bit parts. In 1940, she signed a contract with Universal Studios, playing bit parts and minor roles in features (she is seen briefly in Abbott and Costello's Buck Privates) and serials (again briefly, in Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe and The Green Hornet Strikes Again). Brooks was awarded with her first leading role in a feature film, playing Laura in the adventure thriller The Devil's Pipeline in 1940. Her performance was not well received: Variety described her as "flat." Universal still saw her potential, and gave her the feminine lead in the all-star western serial Riders of Death Valley.
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.) 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 before being cast as the heroine Kiki Walker in the Val Lewton-produced horror film The Leopard Man (1943), directed by Jacques Tourneur. The film received a dismissive review in The New York Times from critic Bosley Crowther, who wrote: "The most horrifying thing about it is that it actually gets on a screen."
After filming The Leopard Man, Brooks appeared in a second horror film produced by Val Lewton, playing the depressed devil-worshipper Jacqueline Gibson in The Seventh Victim (1943), the role for which she is most perhaps most widely remembered today. Though the film did not fare well with audiences at the time of its release, it would go on to receive acclaim from critics in the subsequent decades. Coincidentally, 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 the following year in 1944. It was also widely rumored at the time that she had begun drinking heavily. (Cecilia Maskell, the daughter of Brooks' cousin, Gloria White, later claimed that alcoholism ran in her family).
Alcoholism and retirement
After her much-publicized divorce from Richard Brooks in 1944, Jean remained in Los Angeles and attempted to resume her career. Though she 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 began to unravel and she was noticeably gaining weight as a result of her heavy drinking. She arrived at the September 1945 premiere of First Yank into Tokyo intoxicated; 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 stock at RKO had plunged to an all-time low: having played feminine leads in the Falcon pictures, she was now reduced to a bit part in The Falcon's Alibi. Her 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. Film historian Doug McClelland referred to Brooks as "RKO's resident neurotic" based on her behavior while working for the studio. 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 exploitation drama Women in the Night (1948).
Personal life
Brooks married screenwriter Richard Brooks in 1941; they divorced on September 13, 1944 in Los Angeles. 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. However, Brooks's 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 1956 Brooks wed San Francisco Examiner editor Thomas H. Leddy, to whom she was married until her death. A Protestant, Brooks converted to Roman Catholicism for the marriage. The couple resided in San Francisco, where Brooks worked as a solicitor for classified ads.
Death
In November 1963, Brooks was admitted to Kaiser Richmond Field Hospital in Richmond, California, suffering from complications from Laennec's cirrhosis, which she had lived with her last five years. On November 25, 1963, Brooks fell into a hepatic coma, and died of the condition at 6:35 p.m. She was 47 years old. Her death certificate noted that she had suffered from "nutritional inadequacy" for 15 years, probably stemming from her alcoholism.
Brooks 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, died in 1992 without knowing her whereabouts or 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."
“Just how good an actress are you?,” asks Tom Conway (1904-67 cirrhosis) of Jean Brooks (1915-63 hepatitis and cirrhosis) in The Falcon and the Co-eds (1943). And that is the question.
This actress who was doomed to a life of alcoholism was vulnerable in her appearance and yet put on a front that was tough. She had her demons, and there was a bit of madness underneath, calculating at times, but it’s perhaps for all these reasons that she had to find solace in the bottle.
Jean Brooks is probably best known for her role in the Val Lewton (1904-51 heart attack) low-budget horror movie The Seventh Victim (1943). In it, she donned a black wig as she played the possibly doomed Satanist who is given no choice but to use a noose in her rooming house as her fellow Satanists find her unworthy.
1943 was a big year for Jean as she made several notable B-pictures including a number of the Falcon films. It was after this year that she started to drink heavily, and it is also reported that she suffered from bulimia which makes sense due to her weight problems and the fact it changes heavily from scene to scene in many movies. This can be noted in The Leopard Man (1943), in which she was awfully skinny at the beginning, and yet by the end of the movie she has put on weight. The makeup department was often called in to fix this.
Jean was born in Houston according to reports and lived in Texas before moving to Costa Rica to live on her grandfather’s coffee plantation. I don’t know how reliable the data is but Jean was bilingual as a result and this would be used when she made a trio of films in Spanish. She could also sing and was probably passed over for Jane Greer (1924-2001 cancer) for the singing roles in The Falcon. It is sad as she probably knew she wouldn’t be a star or ever get a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. How do you escape yourself and your reputation? It can drive a person close to the edge, especially in a place like Hollywood where there is constant pressure to behave in terms of the spotlight.
To look at Jean’s early roles in the 1930s you have the primitive Erich Von Stroheim (1885-1957 no cause) movie The Crime of Dr Crespi (1935). Typical of Jean’s early movie credits all she does is give good phone in and scream convincingly. Around 1939 she was in several Spanish language films where she plays a character named Nina and is credited as Robina Duarte. She was regularly credited as Jeanne Kelly before 1940 which was her maiden name before she married the future director Richard Brooks for a few years before the wheels fell off.
Her best films are the Lewton and Falcon ones. The Falcon movies are better than people think and good old Tom Conway needs to be reappraised himself. The Falcon movies are slick RKO B-movie productions with pep and a sense of class. Jean appears in several of them, including the classic The Falcon and the Co-eds (1943). In that one, she is at home among the girls as a drama teacher in that countryside college which has been haunted by a murder and it is possibly a psychic one. She is also good in what little screen time she has in The Falcon in Danger (1943) although she seems a little old to be running away crying “I’ll never speak to you again” like some ten or twelve-year-old girl.
It was The Seventh Victim for which Jean may be most iconically remembered and the movie with its poet named Jason who cannot write has Conway again as the man who wants to help find the nest of devil worshippers and even a man like he is kind of scared in their den as they deal poison to those who have betrayed them.
The Seventh Victim is a movie that can be watched countless times and perhaps inspired Hitchcock’s shower scene from Psycho with a very young Kim Hunter (1922-2002 heart attack) being warned by a figure behind the shower curtain to beware of sticking her nose into places where it doesn’t belong. Jeans’ screen time is short but her Jacqueline is memorable. Once again it must be noted that Jean does not star in any movies and her scenes are often short as she never graduated to a starring role.
Jean was also in the Conway movies which are not Falcon movies named A Night of Adventure (1944) and Two O’Clock Courage (1945). You get the idea that Jean and Conway knew each other well and that they were possibly even drinking buddies in a brother and sister type of way. And you wonder if the sudden demise of Jean’s career was due to her being arrested for drunken or unruly behavior or whether she was put forcibly into rehab. These are purely suppositions but something happened. There were reports of Jean turning up drunk to premieres or gala events to the point where she was tripping over. These were firsthand from Jane Greer and another person mentioned was Marsha Hunt (1917-2022 natural causes). It is interesting to note that both Jean and Conway had crooked teeth while Jean had eyes you could describe as luminous and almost Bette Davis eyes if you want to call them that.
Jean cried no tears and she was often called in to perform as the bad girl or the troubled one. She wasn't a society type although for two of the Falcon movies she is decked out in stylish dresses which are rather modern. Her figure could be called matronly and yet she is chosen as the modern woman.
It was around the 1944 mark that Jean was in the Val Lewton production Youth Runs Wild (1944) which was about juvenile delinquency.
After Two O’Clock Courage (1945) which is about murder one drunken evening and may have Jean as the culprit, she seems to have been excised from The Falcon’s Alibi (1945) despite high billing.
She would only make a couple more movies and one of them was the Republic picture Women in the Night (1948). The film opens strangely enough with two forwards and it tells how hostesses at the officer’s club behind enemy lines helped win World War Two one way or another. As one forward said of the hostesses: “They aroused public opinion.”
The film stars actress Talia Birell (1907-58) among the beautiful framing of women’s faces. Other forgotten names are TV fave Virginia Christine (1920-1996 heart disease) and Bernadene Hayes (1912-87 heart problems).
As for Jean, she appears at the beginning of the movie where she fends off a Nazi officer who tries to rape her, and during the movie, she wears heavy makeup.
This strange movie was ill-timed at the box office in that it was post-war and this was a period when the public wanted to forget about war and move on with their lives. Still, it’s well-made and better than most Republic productions.
The girls offer “pleasant, friendly companionship” to the Nazis, and when Brooks makes her main appearance in the movie she is wearing a wig very similar to the one she wore in The Seventh Victim which goes to show how much of an icon she had already become and perhaps how it would be seen as the ultimate bookend to a broken career.
“Would you trust her?” someone remarks.
The architecture in the movie seems to suggest it really was filmed in Mexico as it is reported by the little-known director William Rowland (1898-1983).
Jean’s eyes are deeply shadowed and yet the allure was still there.
There are no real stars as it’s an ensemble piece and such is the plot also with hints of some non-existent cosmic ray. Jean is the most interesting character in Women in the Night – she is a spy, a collaborator, double agent, and a murderess.
Oscar winner Eugen Schufftan (1893-1977) is credited somewhere for the cinematography and the quality shows as well as it harks back to silent movies like Metropolis and The Big Parade.
Jean bookends this movie but once again she is given little dialogue and we must rely on her ever so slight iconographic self as she literally goes up in flames in a fingernail piercing cat fight.
Jean left Hollywood in 1948 and went to San Francisco dropping out of sight. Even her first husband didn’t know of her whereabouts. She was employed as a classified ad solicitor for the San Francisco Examiner newspaper. In the ‘50s she married printer Thomas Leddy. She also drank too much to the point where she died of hepatitis and liver disease a few days after the Kennedy assassination. Her death certificate noted malnutrition and the fact that she was only 47 years old.
Bad girl, or just misunderstood and lost? Jean I can feel you crying out inside, I feel your hurt and your pain …. I like your voice and your eyes … No your bum doesn’t look big in that … Wanna get a drink?
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