Luise Rainer

Luise Rainer was a German-born actress whose career spanned stage and screen across Europe and the United States. Born on 12 January 1910 in Düsseldorf, Germany, she was raised in Hamburg and later in Vienna, Austria. The daughter of Heinrich and Emilie Rainer, she came from an upper-class Jewish family. Her father was a businessman who had spent much of his childhood in Texas, having been sent there as an orphan at age six, a circumstance that led Rainer as an adult to describe herself as an American citizen by birth. She had two brothers and was born two months premature. Though generally shy at home, she was athletic in school, excelling as a runner and mountain climber.

Rainer traced her interest in performance to age six, when watching a circus act inspired her fascination with the entertainment world. At sixteen, she pursued that ambition by traveling to Düsseldorf under the pretext of visiting her mother, where she had arranged an audition at the Dumont Theater. Her first stage appearance there came in 1928. During the 1920s, theater director Louise Dumont had developed an attachment to several young actresses, including Rainer. Rainer subsequently studied under Max Reinhardt, the leading stage director in Austria, and by age eighteen had attracted a substantial body of critical praise for her unusual talent. She became a member of Reinhardt's Vienna theater ensemble and established herself as a distinguished Berlin stage actress. Her early stage work included Jacques Deval's 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, while performing in Six Characters in Search of an Author, Rainer was seen by MGM talent scout Phil Berg, who offered her a three-year Hollywood contract. Berg believed she would appeal to the same audience as Swedish MGM star Greta Garbo. Rainer had initially expressed no interest in film, stating in a 1935 interview that she had wanted only theater until seeing A Farewell to Arms. She moved to Hollywood in 1935, and MGM studio head Louis B. Mayer assigned actress Constance Collier to train her in English speech and dramatic modulation. Her first American film role was in Escapade, a 1935 remake of one of her Austrian films, co-starring William Powell. Powell had given her equal billing after being impressed by her acting skill.

Her next film, the 1936 musical biography The Great Ziegfeld, brought Rainer international recognition. Despite limited screen time in the role of Anna Held, her emotionally charged performance — particularly a dramatic telephone scene — earned her the Academy Award for Best Actress. Producer Irving Thalberg had been convinced she was the right choice for the role over the objections of studio head Mayer. The following year, Thalberg again championed Rainer for a role the studio resisted, casting her as a poor Chinese farm wife in The Good Earth, based on Pearl Buck's novel. The subdued, unglamorous character stood in sharp contrast to her previous role, yet Rainer won the Academy Award for Best Actress a second time. She became the first performer in history to win consecutive Academy Awards and the first to win multiple Oscars overall. Along with Jodie Foster and Hilary Swank, she is one of only three actresses to have won two Academy Awards before the age of thirty. She was later referred to as the "Viennese teardrop" in connection with her telephone scene in The Great Ziegfeld.

Rainer later reflected that winning two consecutive Oscars had been damaging to her career, as audience expectations became impossible to meet. After a series of less significant film roles, both she and MGM grew dissatisfied, and her three-year film career came to an end. She returned to Europe. Some film historians have described her as the most extreme case of an Oscar victim in Hollywood history. Among the factors cited in her decline were the poor career advice she received from her then-husband, playwright Clifford Odets, and the unexpected death in 1936 of Irving Thalberg, who died at age thirty-seven and whom she greatly admired.

Rainer subsequently returned to the stage and appeared on Broadway between 1942 and 1950. Her Broadway credits included the play The Lady from the Sea and the comedy A Kiss for Cinderella. At the time of her death, thirteen days before what would have been her 105th birthday, she was the longest-lived recipient of an Academy Award and the longest-lived female star from the classic Hollywood era, a distinction that had not been surpassed as of 2026.