Luise Rainer (born January 12, 1910), is a two-time Academy Award-winning German film actress. Of living people who have won Academy Awards, she holds the earliest-awarded Oscars. She is also the oldest of Academy Award winners at 98.
The daughter of Heinrich Rainer by his spouse Emmy née Koenigsberger, Luise was born in Düsseldorf, Germany and educated in Vienna. She made her first appearance on the stage at the Dumont Theatre in Düsseldorf in 1928. She next appeared at various theatres in Jacques Deval's play Mademoiselle, Sydney Kingsley's Men in White, George Bernard Shaw's Saint Joan, Shakespeare's Measure for Measure, Luigi Pirandello's comedy Six Characters in Search of an Author, and she was a member of Max Reinhardt's company in Berlin.
Luise Ranier also acted in Max Reinhardt's Vienna theater and appeared in several German language films before being discovered in 1935 by an MGM talent scout, who felt that she might appeal to the same audience as Greta Garbo, then one of their most successful performers.
She moved to Hollywood that year and studied English under Constance Collier, and made her first American film appearance opposite William Powell in Escapade (1935). Her next two films won her consecutive Academy Awards for Best Actress, first for her portrayal of actress Anna Held in The Great Ziegfeld (1936), for which she also won a New York Film Critic's Award, and next as a Chinese peasant in The Good Earth (1937). Rainer later described winning the two Oscars as the "worst possible thing" to befall her career. The critic James Agate admired Rainer's performance in The Good Earth and described it as "an exquisite rendering", however she was criticised in reviews by publications such as Picturegoer. The critic Max Breen wrote, "Can it be that the Academy has been dazzled by her stage fame, or is there something in her two very limited performances, not perhaps apparent to ordinary mortals, which has transcended anything done in those two years by Garbo herself?" Breen was among those critics indignant that Greta Garbo's performance in Camille had been overlooked in favor of Rainer.
in The Great Ziegfeld (1936)
in Dramatic School (1938)
She made a few films after 1938, but all of them were ill advised and not well received. She refused to be stereotyped or to knuckle under to the studio system and studio head Louis B. Mayer was unsympathetic to her demands for serious roles. Furthermore, she began to fight for a higher salary and she was reported as being difficult and temperamental. Disenchanted with Hollywood, where she later said it was impossible to have an intellectual conversation, she moved to New York City to live with her husband, playwright Clifford Odets, whom she had married in 1937. MGM released Rainer from her contract, and Rainer and Odets divorced three years later. Despite the negativity, Luise was one of the actresses opted for the role of Scarlett O'Hara in Gone With The Wind (1939) but the idea was not well received and Luise wasn't given a screen test for the role.
Ranier made her first appearance on the English stage at the Palace Theatre, Manchester on May 1, 1939 as Francoise in Jacques Deval's play Behold the Bridge and her first London appearance at the Shaftesbury Theatre on May 23, 1939 in the same part. Returning to America she made her first appearance on the New York stage at the Music Box Theatre in May 1942 as Miss Thing in James M. Barrie's A Kiss for Cinderella. When Odets saw Robert Ryan appearing with Rainier in an earlier stock production of A Kiss for Cinderella, he cast the actor in his 1941 Broadway production of Clash by Night.
She made one more film appearance in Hostages in 1943 and abandoned Hollywood in 1944 after she married publisher Robert Knittel. She had become an American citizen in the 1940s, but they had lived in the UK for most of their marriage. He died in 1989. They had one daughter, Francesca Knittel, now known as Francesca Knittel-Bowyer. Rainer lives in Belgravia Square, London, reportedly in an apartment once owned by Vivien Leigh.
Rainer made sporadic television and stage appearances following her and her husband's move to Britain, appearing in a single episode of the World War II television series Combat! in 1965. She took a dual role in a 1983 episode of The Love Boat. She appeared in The Gambler (1997) in a small role, marking her film comeback at the age of 87. She made two appearances at the Academy Awards ceremonies (in 1998 and 2003) in special retrospective tributes to past Oscar winners.
She has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6300 Hollywood Boulevard.
