Louise Rainer

Luise Rainer holds the record for being the youngest person to win two consecutive Best Actress Oscars. She happened in the years 1936 and 1937. But after those wonderful years she only excelled in a few movies, and in the end she was relegated to brief appearances in television series. A case as sad as it is curious, because it is completely a mystery how her aura of a star disappeared.

Luise Rainer was born on January 12, 1910 in Düsseldorf (Germany), into a Jewish family. She was educated in Vienna, although it was in her hometown that she first stepped on stage. The year was 1928. Director Max Reinhardt was captivated by her natural talent and asked her to be part of her theater company. And she there that she was her, so that by the early 30s she dedicated herself to acting in Berlin and Vienna. Between 1932 and 1933 she worked on three German movies, but coinciding with the anti-Semitism that she began to experience in her homeland, a Hollywood talent scout offered her a seven-year contract with MGM. Ella Luise Rainer did not think twice and she emigrated to the United States.

In North America, she made her debut in 1935 with Robert Z. Leonard in Escapade , a romantic comedy with heartthrob William Powell . With the same team, she would touch the sky the following year, thanks to The Great Ziegfeld , a stupendous biographical musical that won 3 Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Actress for Luise Rainer. And without time to recover, the Academy awarded her the Oscar again with her next appearance on screen: the role of O-Lan in The Good Earth , adaptation of the novel by Pearl S. Buck directed by Sidney Franklin. With these awards, the actress had become a great diva in the world of cinema. 1937 was also a prolific year for her, as she stood out in films such as The Emperor’s Candlesticks , again with William Powell or in Frank Borzage ‘s drama Big City , with Spencer Tracy . And not only that, because her personal life also turned upside down after her marriage to Clifford Odets , although they would divorce three years after her. And it seemed that things were also going divinely in 1938, where the film The Great Waltz , a musical film by Julien Duvivier and Victor Fleming , stands out . Less successful was the romantic The Toy Wife, from the many times adventurer Richard Thorpe .

But, suddenly, the story of Luise Rainer practically ended there. Except for a very notable role in the war drama Hostages (1943), Rainer stopped receiving offers and her filmography was cut short. In 1945 she remarried, this time with Robert Knittel, with whom she remained until his death in 1989. Since then she only obtained minimal sporadic roles in some television series. Regarding her cinematographic life, the actress declared: “For my second and third films I won the Academy Award. Nothing worse could happen to me. The Oscar is not a curse. The real curse is that once you win an Oscar they think you can do anything.” It was about to be recovered in 1960 by Federico Fellini , as he wrote a role for her in La dolce vita. However, the actress did not like her role and things did not prosper. Even so, Luise Rainer said goodbye to the cinema with a moderately relevant role in the film The Gambler (1997) .