Recent Obituaries, Classic Films Only

[Matilda]

94. Silver screen star Luise Rainer takes her final bow

Luise Rainer, who has died aged 104, left Nazi Germany for Hollywood and soared to fame in the 1930s as the first star to win back-to-back Oscars, then quit films at the peak of her career for occasional stage work and roles as a wife, mother and mountain climb

Rainer was a child of middle-class Jews in Dusseldorf and Hamburg during World War I and came of age in a new Germany of depression, starvation and revolution. Under Max Reinhardt's direction, she became a young stage and film star in Vienna and Berlin, performing Pirandello and Shaw. She watched the Reichstag burn in 1933 and heard Hitler on the radio. In 1934 an MGM scout signed her to a contract.

She sailed to America on the Ile de France in 1935, a rail thin ingenue with dark hair and a sweet girlish smile, too innocent for celebrity. But it seemed everyone on board knew who she was. On her 25th birthday, the stewards arranged a celebration in the saloon, and she was serenaded by the Russian operatic bass Feodor Chaliapin and the great violinist Mischa Elman.

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More than seven decades later, as she celebrated her centenary in 2010, Rainer, in an interview with The Scotsman, looked back on Hollywood's golden era with a hint of revenge.

"I was one of the horses of the Louis Mayer stable, and I thought the films I was given after my Academy Awards were not worthy," she said. "I couldn't stand it anymore. Like a fire, it went to Louis Mayer, and I was called to him. He said, 'We made you, and we are going to kill you.'

"And I said: 'Mister Mayer, you did not make me. God made me. I am now in my 20s. You are an old man,' which of course was an insult. 'By the time I am 40 you will be dead.'

http://www.smh.com.au/comment/obituaries/silver-screen-star-luise-rainer-takes-her-final-bow-20150101-12ge29.html

I enjoyed what little I have seen of her work – I think it's fair to say that Mayer and MGM didn't know what to do with her. Only she (and the music of Johann Strauss) could lift the schmalz of a film like The Great Waltz into something watchable. And these days, the casting of The Good Earth would be regarded as politically incorrect, but incorrect or no, they don't come much better than Luise Rainer.

Mayer might have ruined her career, but what an amazing life she had; what an extraordinary woman she was.

R.I.P.