Luise Rainer, the German-born Austrian actress who took Hollywood by storm in the 1930s, died on Tuesday, December 30th at her home in London from complications of pneumonia.
Rainer was the first of just five actors to win two back-to-back Oscars. She accomplished this feat for her 1936 performance in “The Great Ziegfeld” and 1937 work in “The Good Earth.” She was married briefly to the poet Clifford Odets. Rainer was preceded in death by her husband Robert Knittel and survived by a daughter, Francesca Knittel-Bowyer.
Rainer famously rejected many of the Hollywood conventions of the day such as always appearing glamorous. Her exit from Hollywood was punctuated with a legendary confrontation with Louis B. Mayer. Rainer made her last film in 1943 and worked sporadically in theater and television until 1997.
“I hated Hollywood,” Rainer said in an interview in 2001. “That’s why I turned my back on it.”
She wanted to be Madame Curie, “but Mayer forbade me.” She wanted to be Maria in “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” but Ingrid Bergman got the role.
“People talk about the ’30s and the ’40s as a great time, but it was also the glamour-puss time,” she told the Guardian newspaper in 1997. “I was never really that. Louis B. Mayer’s motto was, ‘Give me a good looker and I’ll make her an actress,’ which to me was an insult to my profession.”
Her oft-repeated account of her last meeting with Mayer is the stuff of Hollywood legend.
Read the full story: Luise Rainer dies at 104; 1930s star had meteoric rise and fall in Hollywood
