Profile of Luise Rainer on Famous Like Me

Luise Rainer (born January 12, 1910 in either Düsseldorf, Germany or Vienna, Austria) is a film actress. She was Jewish and escaped to the U.S. in the 1930's, becoming an American citizen in the 1940s, but has lived in the United Kingdom for many years now.

Rainer acted in Max Reinhardt's Vienna theater and appeared in several German language films before being discovered by an MGM talent scout in 1935. She moved to Hollywood 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) and next as a Chinese peasant in The Good Earth (1937). She would later describe winning two Oscars as the worst possible thing to befall her career.

The infamous legend of an Oscar curse probably originated with Rainer because, following her two wins, her career virtually ended in Hollywood. She made a few films in 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. 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. Rainer and Odets divorced three years later after a stormy relationship. She made one more film appearance in Hostages in 1943, and abandoned Hollywood in 1944 after she married publisher Robert Knittel. They were married until his death in 1989 and apparently lived in the UK for most of their marriage. They had one daughter, Francesca Knittel.

Rainer made sporadic television and stage appearances in the following decades, appearing in a single episode of the World War II television series Combat in 1965, and took a dual role in an episode of The Love Boat in 1984. She later appeared in the film 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 retropective tributes to past winners.

She has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6300 Hollywood Blvd.

Filmography

• Yearning 202 (1932)
• Madame Has Visits (1932)
• Heut Kommt's drauf an (1933)
• Escapade (1935)
• The Great Ziegfeld (1936)
• The Good Earth (1937)
• The Emperor's Candlesticks (1937)
• Big City (1937)
• The Toy Wife (1938)
• The Great Waltz (1938)
• Dramatic School (1938)
• Hostages (1943)
• The Gambler (1997)
• Poem: I Set a Foot Upon the Air and It Carried Me (2003)

External link

• Luise Rainer at the Internet Movie Database

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