Luise Rainer

Luise Rainer was a German-American-British film actress who was the first person to win multiple Academy Awards for acting. She won her back-to-back Oscars for her role as Anna Held in The Great Ziegfeld (1936) and for playing O-Lan in The Good Earth (1937). She was also the longest-lived Oscar recipient at the time of her death, 13 days shy of her 105th birthday. Rainer started her acting career in Germany at age 16, under the tutelage of Austria's leading stage director, Max Reinhardt. Within a few years, she had become a distinguished Berlin stage actress with Reinhardt's Vienna theater ensemble. Critics highly praised the quality of her acting. After years of acting on stage and in films in Austria and Germany, she was discovered by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer talent scouts, who signed her to a three-year contract in Hollywood in 1935. A number of filmmakers predicted she might become another Greta Garbo, MGM's leading female star at the time. ¹ Her first American film role was in Escapade in 1935. The following year she was given a supporting part in the musical biography The Great Ziegfeld, where, despite limited appearances, her emotion-filled performance so impressed audiences that she was awarded the Academy Award for Best Actress. She was later dubbed the "Viennese teardrop" for her dramatic telephone scene in the film. ¹ For her next role, producer Irving Thalberg was convinced, despite the studio's disagreement, that she would also be able to play the part of a poor, plain Chinese farm wife in The Good Earth (1937), based on Pearl Buck's novel about hardship in China. The subdued character role was such a dramatic contrast to her previous vivacious character that she again won the Academy Award for Best Actress. ¹ However, Rainer later stated nothing worse could have happened to her than winning two consecutive Oscars, as audience expectations from then on would be too high to fulfill. After a string of insignificant roles, MGM and Rainer became disappointed, leading her to end her brief three-year film career, soon returning to Europe. Adding to her rapid decline, some feel, was the poor career advice she received from her then-husband, playwright Clifford Odets, along with the unexpected death at age 37 of her producer, Irving Thalberg, whom she greatly admired. Some film historians consider her the "most extreme case of an Oscar victim in Hollywood mythology". ¹ Rainer continued to act sporadically on stage and screen until 2003. She also devoted herself to painting and writing poetry. She married publisher Robert Knittel in 1945 and had one daughter with him. They lived in Switzerland and London until his death in 1989. Rainer died at her London home on 30 December 2014 at the age of 104 from pneumonia. She was 13 days shy of her 105th birthday. ¹