Luise Rainer, whose touching performances in The Great Ziegfeld and The Good Earth earned her the first back-to-back acting Oscars, has died. She was 104.
Francesca Knittel-Bowyer, Rainer’s only daughter, confirmed to the Associated Press that her mother died on Tuesday from pneumonia. Rainer died at her home in London.
Rainer was born on Jan. 10, 1910 in Vienna, although some sources list her birthplace as Dusseldorf, Germany. She started her film career in Germany, working with Max Reinhardt. However, in the mid-1930s, MGM discovered her and brought her to Hollywood. Her first Hollywood movie was 1935’s Escapade.
Her second film put her career on the map, though. She played Florenz Ziegfeld Jr.’s first wife in The Great Ziegfeld, the 1936 Best Picture Oscar winner. While her part was relatively small in the three-hour musical epic, she had audiences tearing up in the film’s second half, when she calls up Ziegfeld to congratulate him for his second marriage. That scene helped her win her first Best Actress Oscar.
She won her second Oscar the following year for The Good Earth, MGM’s epic adaptation of the Pearl S. Buck Pulitzer Prize-winner. She played O-Lan opposite Paul Muni, giving another tear-jerking performance. The win made her the first person to win back-to-back acting Oscars.
That feat has only been accomplished a few times since - by Spencer Tracy, Katharine Hepburn, Jason Robards and Tom Hanks.
Rainer never quite repeated that kind of success again. As The Hollywood Reporter notes, Rainer left MGM in 1938 over complaints that she wasn’t getting great parts. Her last Hollywood film was 1948’s Hostages. She then moved to London with her second husband, Robert Knittel.
She did appear on TV, taking roles in Combat! and The Love Boat. Her last film was 1998’s The Gambler with Michael Gambon.
“She was bigger than life and can charm the birds out of the trees,” Knittel-Bowyer said of her mother. “If you saw her, you'd never forget her.”
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