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German-born actress Luise Rainer left Hollywood after winning back-to-back Academy Awards in the 1930s (for "The Great Ziegfeld" and "The Good Earth") following a sequence of Hollywood-legend squabbles with MGM head Louis B. Mayer. Rainer wanted serious roles, while Mayer saw her as starlet material. "We made you, and we're going to kill you," Mayer reportedly said to her. Rainer, friends with the ex-patriate community in LA that included Arnold Schoenberg, Thomas Mann and Richard Neutra more than with Hollywood, moved to New York (after divorcing first husband Clifford Odets) then to Europe. She died this morning in London of pneumonia at age 104. She was 28 when she won her second Oscar.
From Claudia Luther's pre-written Rainer obituary in the Los Angeles Times:
In the ensuing decades, Rainer acted here and there on stage or for TV or in a film — her last was a character role in Karoly Makk's "The Gambler" (released in Los Angeles in 1999), for which she was widely praised. But she mostly lived a quiet life in Europe married to British publisher Robert Knittel, with whom she had a daughter. Knittel died in 1989.
Rainer returned to Hollywood for the 2003 and 1998 Academy Awards shows honoring previous Oscar winners and in 2010 for the TCM Classic Film Festival. Her beautiful, heart-shaped face was all smiles for the cameras, but her wounds had not healed."I hated Hollywood," Rainer said in an interview in 2001. "That's why I turned my back on it."
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Her oft-repeated account of her last meeting with Mayer is the stuff of Hollywood legend.
"Louis B. sent for me and said, 'I understand that you want to leave us?' I said, 'Yes, Mr. Mayer, my source is dried out,'" she said. "He looked at me and he said, 'What do you need a source for? Don't you have a director?'
"What could I say? He looked at me for a long time, and then he said, 'You know what?'" —after which he delivered his you'll-never-work-in-Hollywood-again threat. She managed a dignified reply and left….
"He was a monster," Rainer said simply of Mayer.
LuiseRainer.net is devoted to her career and life.
The Oscar ceremony where Rainer received her second Academy Award was the one in 1938 that was delayed for a week by the heavy rains and widespread flooding that led to the Los Angeles River and many runoff streams in the basin being turned into concrete flood control channels. Luther also tells the story that Rainer arrived at the Biltmore late and sobbing after just driving back into town and getting into a big fight with Odets. According to the motion picture academy, the best picture award that year went to "The Life of Emile Zola," the Oscar for dance direction was given for the last time (to Hermes Pan for the Fun House number from "Damsel in Distress"), and a special award was given to Mack Sennett, "for his lasting contribution to the comedy technique of the screen, the basic principles of which are as important today as when they were first put into practice."
Also: Great lede on The Guardian's Luise Rainer obituary.
There are very few actors whose culture and friendships ranged so widely, and who knew so many of the great names of the 20th century, as Luise Rainer, who has died aged 104. She was married for three tempestuous years to the radical American playwright Clifford Odets; she was a key member of Max Reinhardt’s theatre company; she was the lover of the German expressionist playwright Ernst Toller; Bertolt Brecht wrote The Caucasian Chalk Circle for her. She is frequently mentioned in the diaries of the writer Anaïs Nin, who was fascinated by her; she was an intimate of Erich Maria Remarque and Albert Einstein; Federico Fellini begged her to be in La Dolce Vita; and George Gershwin gave her a first edition of the score of Porgy and Bess, with a fulsome dedication to her from the composer.
In addition, Rainer was the first movie star to win a best actress Oscar in successive years, the first for The Great Ziegfeld (1936) and the second for The Good Earth (1937). And yet, she lived the latter part of her life in comparative obscurity in London, under the name Mrs Knittel.
