page_title: Luise Rainer
section_title: Later life and career
hierarchical_section_title: Luise Rainer / Later life and career
caption_attribution_description: Cropped screenshot of Luise Rainer from the trailer for the film Dramatic School
context_page_description: Luise Rainer was a German-American-British film actress. She was the first thespian to win multiple Academy Awards and the first to win back-to-back; at the time of her death, thirteen days shy of her 105th birthday, she was the longest-lived Oscar recipient, a superlative that had not been exceeded as of 2020.
  Rainer started her acting career in Germany at age 16, under the tutelage of Austria's leading stage director, Max Reinhardt. Within a few years, she had become a distinguished Berlin stage actress with Reinhardt's Vienna theater ensemble. Critics highly praised the quality of her acting. After years of acting on stage and in films in Austria and Germany, she was discovered by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer talent scouts, who signed her to a three-year contract in Hollywood in 1935. A number of filmmakers predicted she might become another Greta Garbo, MGM's leading female star at the time.
  Her first American film role was in Escapade in 1935. The following year she was given a supporting part in the musical biography The Great Ziegfeld, where, despite limited appearances, her emotion-filled performance so impressed audiences that she was awarded the Oscar for Best Actress.
context_section_description: While in Europe, Rainer studied medicine and explained she loved being accepted as "just another student", rather than as a screen actress. She returned to the stage and made her first appearance at the Palace Theatre, Manchester, on 1 May 1939 as Françoise in Jacques Deval's play Behold the Bride; she played the same part in her London debut at the Shaftesbury Theatre on 23 May. Returning to America, she played the leading part in George Bernard Shaw's Saint Joan on 10 March 1940 at the Belasco Theatre in Washington, D.C. under the direction of German emigrant director Erwin Piscator. She made her first appearance on the New York stage at the Music Box Theatre in May 1942 as Miss Thing in J. M. Barrie's A Kiss for Cinderella.
  She made an appearance in Hostages in 1943 and abandoned film making in 1944 after marrying publisher Robert Knittel. She initially did not plan on returning to the screen, but explained her comeback in 1943 by saying:
  All the professor and the other students cared about was whether I could answer the questions, not whether I could come to class looking glamorous. But after that brief return to the stage, I began to realize that all the doors which had been opened to me in Europe, and all the work I had been able to accomplish for refugee children, was due to the fact that people knew me from my screen work. I began to feel a sense of responsibility to a job which I had started and never finished. When I also felt, after that experience at Dennis, that perhaps I did have talent after all, and that my too-sudden stardom was not just a matter of happy accident, I decided to go back.
  When Rainer returned to Hollywood, her contract at MGM had long expired and she had no agent. David Rose, head of Paramount Pictures, offered her a starring role in an English film shot on location, but war conditions prevented her from accepting the role. Instead, Rose suggested in 1942 that she make a screen test for the lead role in For Whom the Bell Tolls (1943), but Ingrid Bergman was cast. Rainer eventually settled on a role in Hostages (1943) and told the press about the role: "It's certainly not an Academy Award part, and thank goodness, my bosses don't expect me to win an award with it. ... No, this is something unspectacular but I hope, a step back in the right direction."
  Rainer took her oath of allegiance to the United States in the 1940s, but she and Knittel lived in the UK and Switzerland for most of their marriage. Robert Knittel died in 1989. Luise resided in Eaton Square, Belgravia, London, in an apartment in the same building once inhabited by film star Vivien Leigh, also a two-time Oscar winner. The couple had one daughter, Francesca Knittel, now known as Francesca Knittel-Bowyer. Rainer had two granddaughters, Luisa and Nicole, and two great-grandchildren, Luca and Hunter.
  Federico Fellini enticed her to play the cameo role of Dolores in his 1960 Oscar-winning classic La Dolce Vita, to the point of her travelling to the Rome location, but she quit the production prior to shooting, a fact that has been attributed either to her resistance to an unwanted sex scene or to her insistence on overseeing her own dialogue. The role was later cut from the eventual screenplay. She made sporadic television and stage appearances following her and her husband's move to Britain, appearing in an episode of the World War II television series Combat! in 1965. She took a dual role in a 1984 episode of The Love Boat. For the latter, she received a standing ovation from the crew. She appeared in The Gambler (1997) in a small role, marking her film comeback at the age of 86. She made appearances at the 1998 and 2003 Academy Awards ceremonies as part of special retrospective tributes to past Oscar winners.
  On 12 January 2010, Rainer celebrated her centenary in London. Actor Sir Ian McKellen was one of her guests. During that month, she was present at the British Film Institute tribute to her at the National Film Theatre, where she was interviewed by Richard Stirling before screenings of The Good Earth and The Great Waltz. She
caption: 1938 publicity photo
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