Actress Luise Rainer dies at 104 years in London – EXAME.com

 By Will Dunham – Luise Rainer, actress of German origin that made history in movie to win two in a row figurines Oscar for best actress for the musical ” Ziegfeld – The Star Maker “, 1936, and the drama” Land of the Gods “, 1937, during a brief and stormy career in Hollywood died on Tuesday to 104 years

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 Rainer, former star of the theatrical stage of Vienna and was the oldest actress still alive to have won the Oscar, died of pneumonia in London, said his daughter.

 

 “She was an extraordinary woman who, no doubt, will leave an indelible impression in the industry,” said his daughter Francesca Bowyer told Reuters. “She was a legend, she was my legend.”

 

 Rainer had a meteoric rise in Hollywood followed by an equally dramatic fall after he came into conflict with the head of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studios, Louis B. Mayer on the iron grip he had on his career.

 

 After being cast in a series of works that did not like and be denied participation in the projects he wanted, Rainer broke with MGM and left Hollywood in 1938. She returned only briefly in 1943 to make a movie to rival studio Paramount.

 

 In a 1999 interview with The New York Times, Rainer recalled the threat that Mayer had given him: “We made you and we can kill it.” She said she retorted: “. Mr Mayer, you did me God made me.”

 

 Rainer had an unhappy marriage of three years with Clifford Odets playwright, which ended in 1940. When she became Albert Einstein’s friend, Odets would have been so jealous he used scissors to tear a photograph of the scientist.

 

 The actress married the executive of British publishing industry Robert Knittel in 1945 and lived with him in London and Switzerland until his death in 1989. She lived alone in London since then, with his two Oscars on a shelf in his office .

 

 The Oscar statuette for “Ziegfeld …”, in which he starred with William Powell and Myrna Loy, was the original. While that for “Land of the Gods” was a replacement. She told the Telegraph newspaper in 2009 that gave the original to workers who helped change her from Switzerland to London after Knittel’s death.

 

 “I used (the statue) as an insurer door,” said Rainer. “And she bent.” Katharine Hepburn is the only other woman to win the Oscar for best actress in consecutive years, for “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” (1967) and “The Lion in Winter” (1968).

 

 Rainer was born in January 12, 1910 in Dusseldorf. She obtained early success as a stage actress in Vienna, a protected the theater director Max Reinhardt, before starting in the movies.

 

 The rise of Nazism in the 1930s led Rainer, daughter of a prospero us Jewish businessman who was a US citizen, to move to the United States.

       

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