Oscar Winner Luise Rainer
Back-to-Back Oscar Winning Best Actress Was a Hollywood Rebel
Feb 23, 2008
When Luise Rainer turned 98 in 2008, she extended her record as the oldest living Oscar winner. Her long life has included early theater in Germany, a meteoric rise and fall from Hollywood stardom, and a later life that has for the most part centered on contented retirement in America, Switzerland and now London.
Luise Rainer’s Early Life
Luise was born of Jewish parents in Dusseldorf, Germany in 1910. As a young stage actress, she was discovered by famed European director Max Reinhardt and soon rose to prominence on both the Berlin and Vienna stages. In the early 1930s, she made three German movies but, along with many Jewish actors, became increasingly appalled at the rise of Nazism in her home country. In 1935, she accepted a contract from M-G-M and departed with her parents to Hollywood.
Luise Rainer’s Hollywood Career
Shortly after arriving in America, Rainer appeared in the movie Escapade (1935). The following year, partly on the recommendation of Escapade co-star William Powell and M-G-M producer Irving Thalberg, she was given the role of Anna Held in The Great Ziegfeld. For this, her second American movie, Rainer received the Oscar for Best Actress. In 1937, she repeated her win for playing O-Lan in The Good Earth.
Following her second win, Rainer’s career rapidly declined and she appeared in only six more American movies. With her fade-out began the “Hollywood curse,” the idea that actors can never regain success after winning Oscars. This is not exactly correct in Rainer’s case as the decision to leave a promising career was mainly her own.
Luise Rainer as Rebel
In an era when all facets of an actor’s career were controlled by the studios and their bosses, Rainer was a rebel. She was often seen in public wearing jeans or slacks with unkempt hair and no makeup, a definite no-no during a time when Hollywood stars were expected to always look glamorous.
Rainer, innately shy but yet with strong opinions, never fit into the Hollywood scene in other ways. In a 1999 interview, she told writer Kevin Lewis that "Hollywood was a very strange place. To me, it was like a huge hotel …... On one side people went in, heads high, and very soon they came out on the other side, heads hanging." She was not impressed with most of her fellow actors calling them shallow creatures only interested in clothes, glamour, and fame. Two exceptions were co-stars Powell and Melvyn Douglas who she felt were intelligent men with many interests.
The Final Conflict
After the unexpected death of her staunch supporter, Thalberg, the actress came into conflict with M-G-M boss Louis B. Mayer. When Mayer insisted that her character in The Bride Wore Red (1937) be changed from a prostitute to an naive woman, Luise argued the change and was replaced by Joan Crawford. When Rainer asked Mayer to cast her as Nora in A Doll’s House and as Madame Curie, Mayer refused and instead cast her in frivolous parts and warned her that she risked being blackballed in the industry unless she was more cooperative. In response, she left M-G-M and Hollywood after making Paramount’s Hostages in 1943, never to return as an actress.
Luise Rainer after Hollywood
Becoming an American citizen in 1940, she spent part of the World War II years visiting troops in North Africa and Italy. She called it one of the most satisfying experiences of her life. In 1945, she married her second husband, wealthy publisher Robert Knittel and devoted much of her time raising their daughter, Francesca.
Nor did Rainer completely abandon acting. She starred in a few Broadway plays and from the 1950s through the 1980s appeared in television roles. In 1997, she had a brief, but critically praised, role in a Hungarian/English movie, The Gambler.
Despite her criticisms of Hollywood, Luise happily agreed to attend the Oscar ceremonies in 1997 and 2002 when past winners were honored by the Academy. She jokingly said “If I don’t show up they’ll think I’m dead”.
Sources: Lewis, Kevin, MovieMaker Magazine (September 1, 1999) and Hopwood, Jon C., “Luise Rainer,” Internet Movie Database.
