Luise Rainer was a German and American film actress. She was the first actor to win more than one Academy Award, and at the time of her death, the longest-lived recipient.
Background
The daughter of Heinrich and Emilie (née Königsberger) Rainer, known familiarly as "Heinz" (died 1956) and "Emmy" (died 1961), Rainer was born on 12 January 1910, in Düsseldorf, Germany and raised in Hamburg and later in Vienna, Austria. Some references list her birthplace as Vienna.Describing her childhood, she stated, "I was born into a world of destruction. The Vienna of my childhood was one of starvation, poverty and revolution." Her father was a businessman who settled in Europe after spending most of his childhood in Texas, where he was sent at the age of six as an orphan. (Rainer had stated that because of her father, she is an American citizen "by birth".) Rainer's family was upper-class and Jewish.
Rainer had two brothers and was a premature baby, born two months early. She describes her father as being "possessive" and "tempestuous", but whose affections and concern were centered on her. Luise seemed to him as "eternally absent-minded" and "very different". She remembers his "tyrannical possessiveness", and was saddened to see her mother, "a beautiful pianist, and a woman of warmth and intelligence and deeply in love with her husband, suffering similarly". Although generally shy at home, she was immensely athletic in school, becoming a champion runner and a fearless mountain climber. Rainer said she became an actress to help expend her physical and overly emotional energy. It was her father's wish, however, that she attend a good finishing school and "marry the right man." Rainer's rebellious nature made her appear to be more of a "tomboy" and happy to be alone. She also feared she might develop what she saw as her mother's "inferiority complex".
Education
At age 16, Rainer chose to follow her dream to become an actress; under the pretext of visiting her mother, she traveled to Düsseldorf for a prearranged audition at the Dumont Theater.
In the 1920s the theatre director Louise Dumont separated from her husband. Dumont was attached to a number of young actresses including Fita Benkhoff, Hanni Hoessrich and Rainer. It has been presumed that Dumont was bisexual.
Rainer later began studying acting with Max Reinhardt, and, by the time she was 18, there was already an "army of critics" who felt that she had unusual talent for a young actress. She soon became a distinguished Berlin stage actress as a member of Reinhardt's Vienna theater ensemble. Her first stage appearance was at the Dumont Theater in 1928, followed by other appearances, including Jacques Deval's play Mademoiselle, Kingsley's Men in White, George Bernard Shaw's Saint Joan, Measure for Measure, and Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author.
In 1934, after appearing in several German language films, she was seen performing in the play Six Characters in Search of an Author by MGM talent scout Phil Berg, who offered her a three-year contract in Hollywood. He thought she would appeal to the same audience as Swedish MGM star Greta Garbo. Initially, Rainer had no interest in films, saying in a 1935 interview: "I never wanted to film. I was only for the theater. Then I saw A Farewell to Arms and right away I wanted to film. It was so beautiful."
Career
Rainer moved to Hollywood in 1935 as a hopeful new star. Biographer Charles Higham notes that MGM studio head Louis B. Mayer and story editor Samuel Marx had seen footage of Rainer before she came to Hollywood, and both felt she had the looks, charm, and especially a "certain tender vulnerability" that Mayer admired in female stars. Because of her poor command of English, Mayer assigned actress Constance Collier to train her in correct speech and dramatic modulation, and Rainer's English improved rapidly.
Her first film role in Hollywood was in Escapade (1935), a remake of one of her Austrian films, co-starring William Powell. She received the part after Myrna Loy gave up her role halfway through filming. After seeing the preview, Rainer ran out of the cinema displeased with how she appeared: "On the screen, I looked so big and full of face, it was awful.
Rainer's next performance was as the real-life character Anna Held in the musical biography The Great Ziegfeld, again co-starring William Powell. Powell, impressed by Rainer's acting skill, had given her equal billing in Escapade.
According to Higham, Irving Thalberg felt that only Rainer, of all the studio's stars, could play the part as he saw it. But Rainer recalled that studio head Mayer did not want her playing the part, seeing it as too small: "You are a star now and can't do it," he insisted. Shortly after shooting began in late 1935, doubts of Rainer's ability to pull off the role emerged in the press. She was criticized for not resembling the Polish-born stage performer. The director admitted that the main reason Rainer was cast was her eyes, claiming that they "are just as large, just as lustrous, and contain the same tantalizing quality of pseudo naughtiness" the part required.
As Thalberg expected, she successfully expressed the "coquettishness, wide-eyed charm, and vulnerability" required. Rainer "so impressed audiences with one highly emotional scene," wrote biographer Charles Affron, that she received the Academy Award for Best Actress. In one scene, for example, her character is speaking to her ex-husband Florenz Ziegfeld over the telephone, attempting to congratulate him on his new marriage: "The camera records her agitation; Ziegfeld hears a voice that hovers between false gaiety and despair; when she hangs up she dissolves into tears."
Rainer's next film was The Good Earth (1937), in which she co-starred with Paul Muni; she had been picked as the most likely choice for the female lead in September 1935. The role, however, was completely the opposite of her Anna Held character, as she was required to portray a humble Chinese peasant subservient to her husband and speaking little during the entire film. Her comparative muteness, stated historian Andrew Sarris, was "an astounding tour de force after her hysterically chattering telephone scene in The Great Ziegfeld", and contributed to her winning her second Best Actress Oscar.
Rainer made her final film appearance for MGM in 1938 and abandoned the film industry. In a 1983 interview, the actress told how she went to Louis B. Mayer's office and said to him: "Mr Mayer, I must stop making films. My source has dried up. I work from the inside out, and there is nothing inside to give."[44] Following this altercation, she traveled to Europe, where she helped get aid to children who were victims of the Spanish Civil War. Nevertheless, she was not released from her contract and, by 1940, she was still bound to make one more film for the studio.
Disenchanted with Hollywood, where she later said it was impossible to have an intellectual conversation, she moved to New York City in 1940 to live with playwright Clifford Odets, whom she had married in 1937. Rainer had never made it a secret that she felt terrible as Odets' wife, and exclaimed in a 1938 interview: "All the acting I've done on the stage or screen has been nothing compared to the acting I did in New York, when I tried to make everyone think I was happy – and my heart was breaking." She filed for divorce in mid-1938, but proceedings were delayed "to next October" when Odets went to England. The divorce was finalized on May 14, 1940. Rainer and Odets summered at Pine Brook Country Club in Nichols, Connecticut, where numerous other members of the Group Theatre (New York) also spent the summer of 1936, both acting and writing.
While in Europe, Rainer studied medicine and explained she loved being accepted as "just another student", rather than as a screen actress. She returned to the stage and made her first appearance at the Palace Theatre, Manchester, on May 1, 1939, as Françoise in Jacques Deval's play Behold the Bride; she played the same part in her London debut at the Shaftesbury Theatre on May 23, 1939. Returning to America, she played the leading part in George Bernard Shaw's Saint Joan on March 10, 1940, at the Belasco Theatre in Washington, D.C. under the direction of German emigrant director Erwin Piscator. She made her first appearance on the New York stage at the Music Box Theatre in May 1942 as Miss Thing in J. M. Barrie's A Kiss for Cinderella.
When Rainer returned to Hollywood, her contract at MGM had long expired and she had no agent. David Rose, head of Paramount Pictures, offered her a starring role in an English film shot on location, but war conditions prevented her from accepting the role. Instead, Rose suggested in 1942 that she make a screen test for the lead role in For Whom the Bell Tolls (1943), but Ingrid Bergman was cast. Rainer eventually settled on a role in Hostages (1943) and told the press about the role: "It's certainly not an Academy Award part, and thank goodness, my bosses don't expect me to win an award with it. No, this is something unspectacular but I hope, a step back in the right direction."
Rainer died on December 30, 2014, in London at the age of 104 from pneumonia. She was thirteen days shy of her 105th birthday.