Advertisement
Luise Rainer
Two-time Best Oscar Actress makes a movie comeback after more than 60 years
|
| Luise Rainer in The Great Zeigfeld (1936). |
THE MYTH THAT WINNING the Academy Award is a jinx started with Luise Rainer. Having carried home consecutive Oscars for best actress more than 60 years ago, she abruptly walked away from Hollywood while the gilt was still fresh. Since most film buffs consider leaving L.A. akin to exiting Eden, revisionist wisdom painted Rainer as a fallen star. Her performances in The Great Ziegfeld (1936) and The Good Earth (1937) must have been overrated, historians reasoned. After 1943, when she appeared in Hostages for Paramount, she left America-apparently forever as a mere intriguing footnote in Hollywood lore.
The thing about myths, though, is that they are rarely, if ever, true. Enter Exhibit A, in 1999, in the person of 88-year-old Luise Rainer. Alive and well in her adopted London, Rainer has outlived all of the legendary Hollywood divas of her era and has recently made her first movie in 55 years. The Gambler, which just opened in America, premiered in London and Europe last year. In this adaptation of the Fyodor
Dostoyevsky story by the same name, Rainer plays the matriarch of a debt-ridden aristocratic Russian family of the 1860s who becomes obsessed with gambling. The film is a story within a story. Michael Gambon plays a drunken, destitute Dostoyevsky, who must write the story "The Gambler" in less than a month or lose the rights to his story. Rainer's role is a cameo that comes halfway through the film, but if it's a cameo, it is true ivory, and nothing about the film even matters after her departure. Age has not altered her style, and she has retained the passionate lyricism, the florid theatricality that charmed moviegoers all those decades past.
At The Mark recently to promote the film, all of her charm was in full blossom. The tiny, 90-pound actress was dressed in a cream-white silk pajama suit with beads and seed pearls and crocheted cap. She expressed dismay that the movie depicted her to be far older than her years. In person, she does look younger, perhaps, because she is still coquettish, still fully in command of her senses and scenes.
Truth is, she always has been. The European stage star, who was signed by MGM when she was 23, walked away from the first phase of her career on her own terms. After only three years into her sevenyear contract, she became disturbed by the apathy of the movie colony at a time when Fascism was overtaking Europe and Asia, and labor unrest and poverty were undermining America. When she demanded better movies, the legendary Louis B. Mayer gave her the "you'll never work in this town again" routine and she simply returned to New York with her then husband, playwright Clifford Odets. Odets departed from her life by 1940, but by 1944 she had remarried a handsome, rich publisher named Robert Knittel. With a daughter in tow, the couple lived mainly in Switzerland and London, and for all practical purposes, Rainer left acting.
Born in Dusseldorf in 1912 to prosperous Jewish parents, Rainer had become a popular stage star in Berlin and Vienna in Max Reinhardt's company in the early '30s. (Her German-born father was an American citizen, which helped him escape to America when the war began.) Reinhardt, perhaps the most influential stage director of the century, introduced electricity to stagecraft, which revolutionize lighting. He rejected naturalism in favor of an impressionistic acting style, in which the elfin Rainer shone.
An MGM talent scout spotted Rainer on a European stage, signed her, and she was imported to Hollywood. William Powell, whom she recalls as "a dear man" and "a very fine person," was in many ways responsible for her rapid rise to stardom. Anita Loos suggested Rainer replace a striking Myrna Loy in Escapade (1935), a remake of the German film Masquerade (1934). Powell taught Rainer, who had made a few indifferent films in Germany, to turn around in a shot so she wouldn't be upstaged. "He went to Louis B. Mayer and said, `You've got to star this girl or I'll look like an idiot.'"
MGM cast the team of Powell and Loy with Rainer in The Great Ziegfeld. The emotional telephone scene in which the rejected Anna Held tearfully wishes her ex-husband, Florenz Ziegfeld, luck on his marriage to Billie Burke, is often thought of as the reason why Rainer won her first Academy Award. In fact, the common wisecrack about someone giving an Oscar-winning performance on the telephone may have its origins in that scene. Her renditions of the pre-World War I musical numbers, however, were uncanny re-enactments of European music hall, and have long been overlooked.
Despite the instant fame from the Oscar, Rainer just as quickly grew disenchanted with the void of ideas and intellectual conversation in Hollywood. She found the movie colony to be an unsophisticated world where clothes were a major preoccupation. "I'll tell you a wonderful story," she said. "Coming with all of these ideas that I had, and still have, and still feel because I never change and still believe in the same things. 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." In was no surprise, then, that she considered Melvyn Douglas, her co-star in The Toy Wife (1938), to be her favorite leading man. "He was intelligent, and he was interested also in other things than acting."
|
| Luise Rainer and DominicWest in The Gambler (1999). |
Mayer behaved outrageously when she demanded substantial material. "He would cry phony tears," she recalls. Irving Thalberg supported her ambitions, overriding Mayer when he opposed her casting in The Good Earth. "He wanted me to be glamorous." After Thalberg died during the filming of The Good Earth, she felt lost. Mayer "didn't know what to do with me, and that made me so unhappy. I was on the stage with great artists, and everything was so wonderful. I was in a repertory theater, and every night I played something else." She wanted to play Nora in a film of A Doll's House or Madame Curie, but Mayer gave her the absurd The Toy Wife.
The Good Earth was a superior movie by Hollywood standards, but it clearly owed its realism to Rainer's intense acting. She resisted wearing heavy makeup, taking her inspiration from a Chinese woman who was an extra in the film. "I had a wonderful director, Sidney Franklin .... I worked from inside out. It's not for me, putting on a face, or putting on makeup, or making masquerade. It has to come from inside out. I knew what I wanted to do and he let me do it.
"Hollywood was a very strange place. To me, it was like a huge hotel with a huge door, one of those rotunda doors. On one side people went in, heads high, and very soon they came out on the other side, heads hanging."
She wasn't the first stage star to walk out of an MGM contract. Helen Hayes left soon after her Oscar win in 1932 to return to Broadway. Lynn Fontanne and Alfred Lunt made one movie, got Oscar nominations, and left, telling Irving Thalberg, "We can be bought but we can't be bored." Most of the great stage stars of the era resisted movie offers. Claudette Colbert and Katharine Hepburn were the exceptions.
Unlike the others, however, Rainer did not really return to the stage. Throughout World War II, she worked for the war effort, often making appearances at war bond drives with Eleanor Roosevelt. For Army Special Service, she talked with soldiers throughout North Africa and Italy, asking what they liked to read and what they thought, and supplying them with books. On bleak Ascension Island in 1944, Rainer experienced a moment of truth which she rarely experienced in Hollywood. No women, except for a few nurses, were available as dance partners for the soldiers. "On Christmas night, I danced with all kinds of fellows with pimples and all kinds of sores. I suddenly felt, ‘What is this being shy? I have to give myself, I just felt I didn't want to be shy, I didn't want to draw away, but give myself, I mean, not physically, but be there. It was a great lesson also for me, this tour through Africa and Italy during the war."
All these years later, Rainer says she is apolitical, yet she readily admits to concern with the situation in Yugoslavia. She has been an outspoken public critic of the bombing in Kosovo. "How can you close your eyes and say this has nothing to do with me? I'm not speaking about politics. Politics is a terrible thing. Everyone wants power."
Having watched Hollywood from afar all these years, Rainer is equally opinionated, especially about the "speed and murder" in so many American films. "I was on an airplane and they showed a film, the worst film I've ever seen (about) the end of the world, Armageddon .... You see the emphasis-what can we do to frighten people more?"
As for the brief, but poignant rejuvenation of her own movie career in The Gambler, Rainer said she would consider other roles on her own terms, of course. Just like the first time around, one gets the feeling Rainer doesn't measure herself by celluloid standards.
"If I can do a story which makes sense, I would do it," she said. "My life has been wonderful. I've seen a lot, I've lived a lot, I've met a lot of good people. I had a wonderful husband for 45 years. My child [Francesca Bowyer] is a dear child ...I was very fortunate in being in contact with a lot of people who made sense."
Still, just for a moment, one could wonder what a
star she might have been. When I walked her to the entrance to
the hotel lobby, she distracted me from saying goodbye in the normal
fashion, departing instead as the consummate diva. Drawing her
hand delicately across my arm, she directed my glance downward.
When I looked up a moment later, she was already moving across
the floor, a ghostly figure in white which shimmered under the
chandeliers...a leading lady to the end. MM
SHARE THIS STORY |
TAGS |
Digg
StumbleUpon
Facebook
Del.icio.us
Reddit
YahooAdvertisement
COMMENTS | POST A COMMENT 
- Comment by Todd Metcalf on 5/08/08 at 2:05 am
How do I send a fan letter to Luise Rainer? She’s fantastic!
- Comment by Karen on 6/12/08 at 7:51 pm
She certainly makes growing old a beautiful adventure!
What a lovely lady....
- Comment by María Alejandra on 8/19/08 at 5:59 pm
I am disappointed by “the wonderful history” told by Luise Rainer.Because she interpreted a joke, an ironic answer (which without doubt was dedicated to Louis B. Mayer) as a declaration of principles. Robert Taylor was an intelligent and well-read man. And “he was interested also in other things than acting” mainly music, he was specially versed in music (he was musician, he played the cello). You can know him through his personal letters, interviews, articles written by him and in the anecdotes told by co-workers, directors and producers. But of course, he was not a theater actor but a movie star. I find in Mrs. Rainer’s comment , prejudice and arrogance. Sad. I am sorely disappointed.
My very kindest regards- Comment by Sharon Margiotta on 1/12/09 at 10:01 am
Robert Taylor was a womanizer, as well as wanting nice clothes. Luise was right in her estimation of Taylor. Maybe Maria should have read up on Taylor, before commenting.
Hooray for a very lovely lady, Luise Rainer. We loved all your movies.- Comment by María Alejandra on 1/14/09 at 11:10 am
Maybe Rainer should have read up on Taylor, before commenting.
“An actor should dress well, a great deal depends upon that.” said Louis B. Mayer. Mayer literally dressed Taylor because he couldn’t afford it at that time, his salary didn’t go very far , he holds Hollywood record for lowest contract salary -$35 a week . No wonder he was speaking in jest. But I can’t understand Rainer’s reaction. I think Luise Rainer wanted to show her scorn for Hollywood and its frivolous way of life and she chose mistakenly this silly story. Taylor as Stanwyck, both were private persons not glamorous at all, everybody knows that. I have read in an old magazine, Screen Pictorial, March-1937, that “Taylor next film is “Maiden Voyage”, he will appear with Luise Rainer, the brilliant young Viennese actress of ·The Great Ziegfield”. Knowing him, then, she would have been able to separate the well dressed romantic heart throb created by MGM from the real man, shy, private, humble,serious-minded man.
This story was published in the September/October 1999 MovieMaker Magazine. The headline was:
Luise Rainer: She Did it Her Way / Two-time Best Oscar Actress makes a movie comeback after more than 60 years
Order this issue | Subscribe to MM
SITE DELIVERY OPTIONS
