Back-to-Back Oscar Winner Luise Rainer Passes Away at Age 104

BBC News reports that actress Luise Rainer has passed away at the age of 104. She is survived by her daughter, Francesca Knittel-Bowyer, who revealed to the BBC that her mother had died of pneumonia at her home in London.

The actress was the longest-living person ever to receive an Academy Award and the first to win back-to-back Academy Awards. Spencer Tracy, Katharine Hepburn, Jason Robards and Tom Hanks are the only other actors to win consecutive Oscars.

Rainer's training began in Germany from the age of 16 by leading Austrian stage director Max Reinhardt. After a few years, she became recognized as a "distinguished Berlin stage actress", acting with Reinhardt's Vienna theater ensemble. Critics "raved" about her stage and film acting quality, leading MGM to sign her to a three-year contract and bring her to Hollywood in 1935. A number of filmmakers anticipated she might become another Greta Garbo, MGM's leading female star.

Her first American role was in the film Escapade (1935), which was soon followed with a relatively small part in the musical biopic The Great Ziegfeld (1936). Despite her limited appearances in the film, she "so impressed audiences" that she won the Oscar for Best Actress. For her dramatic telephone scene in the film, she was later dubbed "the Viennese teardrop". In her next role, producer Irving Thalberg was convinced, despite the studio's disagreement, that she could play the part of a poor uncomely Chinese farm wife in The Good Earth, based on Pearl Buck's novel about hardship in China. The subdued character she played was such a dramatic contrast to her previous, vivacious character, that she won another Academy Award.

In 1937, Rainer began a brief marriage to playwright Clifford Odets which ended in divorce. In 1944 she married publisher Robert Knittel, who passed away in 1989.

Photo courtesy of LuiseRainer.net

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