MGM vs The First Winner of Back-to-Back Academy Awards

In 2010, actor Luise Rainer completed the Proust Questionnaire for Vanity Fair. In response to the question, “What is the trait you most deplore in yourself?” Rainer responded: “My inferiority complex.”

It is not our place to question what was going on inside Luise Rainer’s head, but throughout her life she gave the appearance of being a woman with incredible talent and an unshakeable sense of what she wanted and what needed to do in order to get it.

Born in Dusseldorf in 1910, Rainer was raised in Hamburg and Vienna. A child brimming with energy, she was an avid runner and mountain climber and by the age of 16, Rainer was convinced that the theatre was the place where she could best channel all of that energy. Knowing her father’s view on the theatre (not a fan), Rainer orchestrated a visit back to Düsseldorf on the pretext of going to stay with relatives. In reality, her goal was to audition for the Dumont Theatre, run by the former actress and powerhouse, Louise Dumont.

The audition was a success and Rainer was invited to train at the school attached to the theatre. Her father declared her a whore, and promptly disowned her.

In 1928 she made her debut playing the lead in the controversial coming of age production - Spring Awakening - in which she played the lead, Wendell Bergmann (spoiler: who gets pregnant and dies after a botched abortion.) Rainer performed with the theatre until 1831.

After her time with the Dumont Theatre, Rainer went on to study acting with avant-garde Austrian theatre and film director, Max Reinhardt and joined his Vienna theatre ensemble.

By 1934 she had three films under her belt, multiple stage roles and was performing in the absurdist play, Six Characters in Search of an Author, when she was scouted by the legendary talent agent, Phil Berg for MGM who was looking for the next Ingrid Bergman. Berg was renowned for his eye for talent, building an actor portfolio that included Clark Gable, Judy Garland, Lucille Ball and Buster Keaton.

Berg offered Rainer a seven picture deal if she would come to the US. A year earlier, Rainer had witnessed the burning of the German Reichstadt, jumped at the opportunity to leave Germany and so, with her Scottish Terrier, Johnny, under her arm, she boarded a ship for New York.

Rainer arrived in New York on 12 January 1935 to a crush of reporters and photographers. Despite that early excitement about her arrival, her promised film failed to materialise. It was Johnny who inadvertently led to her getting her first break. While walking Johnny along the beach in Santa Monica, Rainder ran into the author and screenwriter Anita Loos, who told her that the actress, Myrna Loy, was dropping out of the film Escapade. Rainer went straight to the studio and insisted that she be given the role. The studio was reluctant but also desperate, as half the film was already in the can. Rainer’s persistence paid off and she landed the role.

And the critics loved her.

A review of her performance at the time stated that “Her great charm is her simplicity and directness.” And in a portent of things to come the magazine claimed that “in a couple of weeping scenes she demonstrates that she is a first class chest-heaver and hysterics-thrower.”

Following on from Escapade, Rainer was cast in The Great Ziegfeld, a screen adaptation of the Broadway show, Ziegfeld Follies. In 1936 the film won best picture and, a year and two months after her arrival in New York, Rainer won the Academy Award for best actress.

The Great Ziegfeld also earned Rainer the moniker of ‘the Viennese* Teardrop’ for a scene in which she cried at the news of her ex-husband remarrying. Speaking later about her ability to cry so convincingly, Rainer explained that the day before shooting she had been at the vet with Johnny and had met a small dog that was due to be put to sleep. When the time came to cry on set, Rainer turned her mind to the dog and its life-ending illness and promptly burst into tears.

A year later, at the age of 27, Rainer made history, winning a second Academy Award, this time for The Good Earth. She was the first actor to ever win back-to-back Academy Awards and to this day, one of only five actors to have done so, alongside Spencer Tracy, Katharine Hepburn, Jason Robards, and Tom Hanks.

Rainer, however, would later describe that second award as the worst thing that could have happened to her. She wanted meaty roles. The studio wanted her to be a vacuous starlet.

She made five more films in the next two years, but nothing that earned her critical praise or awards.

“I was a machine, practically, a tool in a big, big factory, and I could not do anything. I wanted to film Madame Curie, but Mayer forbade me. I wanted to do For Whom the Bell Tolls, but [producer David O] Selznick took Ingrid Bergman and brought her to Hemingway and I didn’t know Hemingway.”

And so she decided to leave.

But first she had to confront, MGM studio boss, Louis B Mayer. Mayer had left school at the age of twelve to work in his family’s scrap metal business in Boston. In 1937, at the age of 53, Meyer became the first person in the US to earn a million dollar salary and he was not having interested in listening to Rainer’s complaints about her career. He was even less interested in her threats to quit Hollywood. He told her: “We created you. We will destroy you.”

Rainer responded: “God created me - in 20 years* you will be dead and I will be a famous actress.”

Having said her piece, Rainer moved to New York, divorced her first husband and returned to the stage.

Years later, in an interview she described that moment and her desire to be done with them: “And so I left. I just went away. I fled. Yes, I fled.”

In addition to her theatre work, while in New York, Rainer and her friend Albert Einstein worked to support organisations bringing European children - refugees from the war - to the United States. .

In 1943 Rainer made The Hostage, the last film she owed MGM and then she was finally free of them.

Two years later she married her second husband, publisher Robert Knittel and she left Hollywood behind. The couple divided their time between the UK and Switzerland until Knittel’s death in 1989.

Rainer lived in London until 2014 when she died at the age of 104.

In the Proust Questionnaire, Rainer was asked, “When and where were you happiest?”

She replied:

In the mountains, climbing into beautiful places— anything that has to do with nature. I feel best in nature or near nature. And I was most happy, of course, when I was with my husband and we were in beautiful landscapes.

*Rainer was promoted as having come from Austria to avoid association with Germany and the Second World War.

**Louis B Meyer died in 1957 at the age of 73.