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View Full Version : RIP 2-Time Oscar Winner for Best Actress Luise Rainer



Kingspoint
01-12-2015, 02:50 PM
Today, she would have been 105. She passed away on Dec 30th, just two weeks ago, in London.

She was sharp as a tack until the day she died, conducting a nice interview with with TCM at the age of 103. She was the epitome of class, the antithesis of Hollywood.

She was the first back-to-back Oscar Winner. First for "The Great Zeigfield" in 1937, and then for "The Good Earth" in 1938. Feeling Hollywood was intellectually void of open sharing of ideas, she retired after 1938 (I've always loved "The Great Waltz" that she was in that year.).

As she tells it, "Soon after I was there in Hollywood, for some reason I was at a luncheon with Robert Taylor sitting next to me, and I asked him, 'Now, what are your ideas or what do you want to do,' and his answer was that he wanted to have 10 good suits to wear, elegant suits of all kinds, that was his idea. I practically fell under the table."

"I just had to get away," she said about Hollywood. "I couldn't bear this total concentration and interviews on oneself, oneself, oneself. I wanted to learn, and to live, to go all over the world, to learn by seeing things and experiencing things, and Hollywood seemed very narrow." When World War II broke out in Europe, Rainer was joined by her family, as her German-born father was also an American citizen, allowing them all to escape Hitler and the Holocaust. Even before the outbreak of war, Rainer had been very worried about the state of affairs of the world, and she could not abide the escapist trifles that M.G.M. wanted to cast her in. When she protested, Mayer told Rainer that if she defied him, he would blackball her in Hollywood.

Disturbed by Hollywood's apathy over fascism in Europe and Asia, and by labor unrest and poverty in the U.S., she decided to walk out on her contract.

https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcRF-1l0_Lc9q-eXc-Jtcq7ryAQGfveVDUj-2L0M4a_RauzYJ1zo

https://luiserainer.files.wordpress.com/2015/01/luiserainer-tcmfilmfestival2010.jpg

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http://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-30631088