Luise Rainer: a life in clips
Courtesy http://www.theguardian.com/film/filmblog/2014/dec/30/luise-rainer-life-in-clips
The German-born star, who has died at the age of 104, had a quick climb to the top in 1930s Hollywood – and an equally rapid descent
Luise Rainer, said to have been a keen childhood mountaineer, ascended to Hollywood's peak swiftly but suffered a vertiginous fall after finding her intellectual outlook and solid sense of self-worth were out of sync with the studio system. The German-born star astonished many with her acting ability and became the first person to win consecutive best actress Oscars, the second of which was obtained for a film in which she hardly spoke a word.
Her first Oscar came for her performance in The Great Ziegfeld (1936). This film had some strong autobiographical echoes, with Rainer bringing her own exoticism and, possibly, her experience as a Hollywood newcomer – she had only arrived in the US the year before – to the role of theatrical performer Anna Held. In this clip Held plays up her unfamiliarity with English and anxiety about how she will be received in the US while negotiating like a hard-headed veteran over finances.
A later scene where Held tearfully speaks on the telephone with her ex-husband Ziegfeld attracted particular admiration (about 8 mins in)
Oscar number two for Rainer came with The Good Earth in 1937, an adaptation of Pearl S Buck's Pulitzer-winning novel set amid the Chinese civil war. Rainer was rewarded for her remarkably expressive, largely non-verbal performance as O-Lan, a put-upon wife, who struggles through war, famine and appalling poverty.
But it was downhill from there in terms of her Hollywood career. She starred in several more films but suffered diminishing critical returns through outings such as Big City (1937), in which she starred opposite Spencer Tracy as a cab driver's wife accused of carrying out a bombing.
Her last big hit was The Great Waltz, in which she played alongside Fernand Gravet and Miliza Korjus in a biopic of Austrian composer Johan Strauss II. The trailer describes the film as "The Great Ziegfeld in Waltz Time!"
Her demands for serious roles and more money were not well received at the time and she gained a reputation for being difficult. She left the movie business, but continued to act on stage and lived an impressive and colourful life that included a career as an artist and an episode in which she signed a visa affidavit to help Bertholt Brecht's passage from Nazi Germany to the US.
Her first Oscar came for her performance in The Great Ziegfeld (1936). This film had some strong autobiographical echoes, with Rainer bringing her own exoticism and, possibly, her experience as a Hollywood newcomer – she had only arrived in the US the year before – to the role of theatrical performer Anna Held. In this clip Held plays up her unfamiliarity with English and anxiety about how she will be received in the US while negotiating like a hard-headed veteran over finances.
A later scene where Held tearfully speaks on the telephone with her ex-husband Ziegfeld attracted particular admiration (about 8 mins in)
Oscar number two for Rainer came with The Good Earth in 1937, an adaptation of Pearl S Buck's Pulitzer-winning novel set amid the Chinese civil war. Rainer was rewarded for her remarkably expressive, largely non-verbal performance as O-Lan, a put-upon wife, who struggles through war, famine and appalling poverty.
But it was downhill from there in terms of her Hollywood career. She starred in several more films but suffered diminishing critical returns through outings such as Big City (1937), in which she starred opposite Spencer Tracy as a cab driver's wife accused of carrying out a bombing.
Her last big hit was The Great Waltz, in which she played alongside Fernand Gravet and Miliza Korjus in a biopic of Austrian composer Johan Strauss II. The trailer describes the film as "The Great Ziegfeld in Waltz Time!"
Her demands for serious roles and more money were not well received at the time and she gained a reputation for being difficult. She left the movie business, but continued to act on stage and lived an impressive and colourful life that included a career as an artist and an episode in which she signed a visa affidavit to help Bertholt Brecht's passage from Nazi Germany to the US.
