Elisabeth Brooks

It is a truth universally acknowledged that two women living together are Just Good Friends. Don’t get me wrong; I have had female roommates over the years. A lot of straight, and straight-by-rounding-error, women do. Still, a lot of women over the course of history have had their relationships erased that way by people discussing them even when the evidence is plain. It’s such a joke at this point that I was startled to read the biography on the IMDb page for Elisabeth Brooks and note that Kristy McNichol is referred to simply as her “longtime friend.”

To be fair, they’d broken up years before. I don’t know exactly when they were together. Neither of them were out at the time. And they did stay friends. But it’s the sort of thing you think is a joke until suddenly it’s staring you in the face in the wild, and an elusive reference to their having “separated” is not enough for you to really get it. I have friends I haven’t seen in a long time, and maybe a weird person could call that having separated, especially if the friend then came back to care for me when I was, theoretically, diagnosed with terminal cancer.

It’s possible they met on the set of 1989’s The Forgotten One, the only credit they shared. (They both did episodes of Starsky and Hutch, but it wasn’t the same episode.) Or maybe they were in the movie together because of their association. I haven’t seen it, but it appears to be one of several schlocky horror movies Brooks was in. Afterward, she appears to have gone into the theatre, including theatrical charities. She also worked as an acting coach; while the movies she was in don’t appear to have been great, she is not considered to have been the problem.

There’s frankly not a lot about her out there. The first page of search results I have about her includes a two-paragraph obituary in the Deseret News, and I’m not actually sure why. None of my information suggests she was Mormon, and she was born in Toronto and died in Palm Springs. I know she was a single mother who was supporting her son with her acting, not the easiest way to do that, but I don’t know how that happened. No marriage, at least, is listed.

Brooks is iconic to fans of ‘80s horror. The Howling is considered a classic. But her screen career was short and consists largely of the ‘70s Standard TV Career—well, Starsky and Hutch, after all. She did a Rockford Files and two episodes of Emergency! She also wrote two stage plays. I don’t know why her career wasn’t longer; she chose not to be in The Howling II, and I don’t know; maybe that damaged her career. Hard to tell with these things. Certainly nobody’s written the information where I can find it.