Luise Rainer, the 1930s film star who won two Oscars in a row before turning her back on Hollywood, died Tuesday, her daughter said. At 104, she was the oldest surviving Academy Award winner. She passed away before dawn at her home in London, Francesca Knittel-Bowyer, her only child, told fans on her Twitter account.
"She left with grace and peace after battling pneumonia," Bowyer added in an email to AFP. "She leaves her indelible print on her profession and all those who touched her. No doubt she is readying her entrance to heaven, and definitely to rearrange it." Born in Germany into an affluent Jewish family, Rainer appeared in just 14 movies, collecting Academy Awards for her leading roles in the 1936 film "The Great Ziegfeld" and "The Good Earth" the following year when she was 28.
She was the first actor, male or female, ever to win two consecutive Oscars - a feat only matched by four others, including Katherine Hepburn. But in an era when cigar-chomping studio moguls called the shots, Rainer chaffed at the "fluffy" roles thrust upon her by legendary MGM boss Louis Mayer after her double Oscar triumph. "He said, 'We made you and we are going to destroy you,'" she told the Daily Telegraph newspaper in London shortly before her 100th birthday.
"Well, he tried his best." Briefly and unhappily wedded to US theater director and screenwriter Clifford Odets, Rainer later enjoyed a happier marriage with British publisher Robert Knittel, who died in 1989. Away from Hollywood, Rainer built a career in live theater, appearing in plays in Britain and the United States. From the 1950s she ventured into television drama, appearing in BBC productions and, in 1984, an episode of the popular US series "The Love Boat."
One of her last film roles was in "The Gambler," a 1997 drama by Hungarian director Karoly Makk, based on a Fyodor Dostoevsky novel. Rainer returned to Hollywood for the 70th anniversary of the Academy Awards in 1998, saying: "If I don't show up they'll think I'm dead." She lived in London for more than two decades, moving to the British capital from Switzerland - and giving her Oscar statuettes to the moving men.