One of the last remaining people who rose to fame during the Golden Age of Hollywood has died just a few weeks before her 105th birthday. Luise Rainer was the first person to ever win two consecutive Best Actress Oscars: in 1936 for her role as Anna Held in The Great Ziegfeld and in 1937 for her role as the Chinese peasant O-Lan in the movie adaptation of Pearl Buck’s The Good Earth. When discussing her double Oscar victory, she is reported to have said, “Nothing worse could have happened to me.” Born into a well-to-do Jewish family in Dusseldorf, Germany, on January 12, 1910, Rainer began studying acting with Max Reinhardt when she was 16 and by 18 was a big success on the Berlin stage. She made a few films in Germany before she was brought to MGM in 1935. But Rainer was not suited for life in Hollywood. She hated doing interviews and had little tolerance for the trappings of the being a movie star. “Stars are not important,” she said later, “only what they do as a part of their work is important. Artists need quiet in which to grow. It seems Hollywood does not like to give them this quiet. Stardom is bad because Hollywood makes too much of it, there is too much bowing down before stars. Stardom is weight pressing down over the head — and one must grow upward or not at all.”
But in spite of her attitude (maybe because of it?), Rainer was soon acclaimed as one of the most promising actresses in the movie industry. The attention she received as a result of winning back-to-back Oscars for her second and third films at MGM led to her continued dissatisfaction with her movie career. She marched into studio head Louis B. Mayer’s office and said, “Mr. Mayer, I must stop making films. My source has dried up. I work from the inside out, and there is nothing inside to give.”
I had the great thrill of seeing Robert Osborne interview the then 100-year-old Luise Rainer at the first TCM Classic Film Festival in Hollywood in April 2010. She returned to her old haunting grounds to introduce a screening of The Good Earth. What ended up being the highlight of the entire festival did not start out well.
Rainer’s rare appearance was being videotaped for a special that would air later on TCM. We had to wait quite a while once we were inside Grauman’s Chinese Theater for the interview. They recorded us applauding, cheering, laughing, looking transfixed, and giving a standing ovation — all before Ms. Rainer came out. When the actress finally did appear, she announced with great agitation that she had broken her hearing aid that morning and couldn’t hear a thing. Rainer seemed close to tears. Robert Osborne tried screaming questions into her ear but she kept saying “What? What?” Finally, someone in the audience held up some paper and a pen and suggested that Osborne write questions for the elderly actress. Duh! It worked like a charm. Rainer, 100 years old and deaf as a stone, was one of the most powerful speakers I’ve ever heard. She spoke eloquently of her experience in Hollywood including her decision to leave at the height of her game, and how she went about inhabiting the emotions of a character rather than acting the role.
It was mind-boggling to realize we were sitting there watching a contemporary of Irving Thalberg (who she loved), Louis B. Mayer (who she did not), and Greta Garbo (who she said was the most beautiful creature she’d ever seen). She spoke of her marriage to the brilliant playwright Clifford Odets (his first play, Awake and Sing! is probably my favorite piece of theater) and her second husband, Robert Knittel, to whom she was married for 47 years, until his death in 1989. Rainer moved me to tears throughout the interview. She kept coming back to the importance of real connections between people, how we are all alike in so many ways, and how our love for each other is the only thing that matters.
In discussing The Good Earth, Rainer said she refused to wear the mask the studio concocted for her so she’d look more Chinese (“Are you mad?” she said to them when they tried to cover her face). When asked about her co-star in that film, actor Paul Muni, Rainer said, “Oh, I’m a naughty girl,” and proceeded to honestly answer the question. She revealed that she despised his acting technique, so different from her own, and the fact that he had his wife sit directly under the camera for every take so she could tell him what she thought of it and if he looked good. Oy, Paul. Thalberg had originally wanted to shoot Pearl Buck’s story on location in China with an all-Chinese cast but the studio wouldn’t go for it and in the end the film was shot on a farm in Chatsworth with a group of Caucasians playing the leads. Such a thing would never happen today, thank God (well, maybe not — think of the current controversy related to the casting of Caucasian actors in Ridley Scott’s Exodus: Gods and Kings) but, I have to admit, unlike Katharine Hepburn’s misguided attempt to play a Chinese peasant in Dragon Seed several years later, Rainer is actually believable as O-Lan.
Luise Rainer only made a few more films in her long life, including a moving appearance in the 1997 film The Gambler, based on the Dostoyevsky book, which marked her first screen appearance in 54 years. Commenting years later on her decision to leave Hollywood, she said, “I was very young. There were a lot of things I was unprepared for. I was too honest, I talked serious instead of with my eyelashes and Hollywood thought I was cuckoo…I didn’t run away from anybody in Hollywood. I ran away from myself.”