The first star to win an acting award at the Oscars in consecutive years has passed away from pneumonia at the age of 104 in London.
- Dec 31, 2014
AceShowbiz - Luise Rainer, the first star to win an acting award at the Oscars in consecutive years, has passed away. The one-time Hollywood golden girl died on Tuesday, December 30 at her home in London from pneumonia, announced her only daughter Francesca Knittel-Bowyer. She was 104.
Rainer got her first Academy Award for her role in "The Great Ziegfeld" in 1936 and then her second for her performance in "The Good Earth" in 1937. After her, only a few other stars have achieved such feat. They include Spencer Tracy, Katharine Hepburn, Jason Robards, and Tom Hanks.
She rose to meteoric fame, but her career quickly dimmed after she had a row with MGM chief Louis B. Mayer and cut off her ties with his company. "I was a machine, practically, a tool in a big, big factory, and I could not do anything," she explained in a 1999 interview.
She felt suffocated by her contract with MGM because Mayer never approved of her choice of film roles. The studio's head even scoffed at her decision to star in "The Good Earth", which earned her a second Oscar. "He thought it was terrible for a young girl in her twenties to play an old Chinese woman," she said.
Mayer also reportedly tried but failed to cut the famous telephone scene in "The Great Ziegfeld" where Rainer played the wife of impresario Florenz Ziegfeld. In the scene that Rainer wrote herself, her character tearfully congratulated her ex-husband on his marriage to another woman. It's widely believed that she won her first Oscar for this dramatic part.
As Rainer later known as "Viennese teardrop" was stuggling to adjust to the Hollywood studio system, her marriage to playwright Clifford Odets was falling apart. They eventually divorced in 1940 after three tumultuous years of marriage. "I was the most unhappy girl you could imagine," she said.
After walking away from her contract with MGM, she moved to New York before returning to Europe and eventually settling in England. In 1945, she married British publisher Robert Knittel who died in 1989. "Cliff was my passion," she said. "Robert was my home." She is survived by her daughter and two granddaughters.
One of her last films was 1998's "The Gambler" with Michael Gambon and Dominic West.
