Luise Rainer

German-born actress (1910–2014)

OverviewAI-generated

Luise Rainer (1910–2014) was a German and American actress who worked in film, television, and on stage. Born in Vienna or Düsseldorf, she began her career in 1928 and continued working until 1997. Rainer was a student of Max Reinhardt and Constance Collier. She received the Academy Award for Best Actress and has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Her notable works include *Property from the estate of Luise Rainer* and *Saint Joan*.

Rainer spoke English and German. She resided in London, Düsseldorf, Hamburg, and Vienna at various times. She was married to Clifford Odets. Rainer died in London in 2014 from pneumonia, which was attributed to natural causes.

Synthesized by Vinony from 41 facts across 9 sources: Wikidata, Crossref, MusicBrainz, Last.fm, TMDb, Open Library, Wikiquote, Vinony collections, Vinony graph. Generated from structured data (not the Wikipedia text) and checked against those facts — may still contain errors.

Person · Open Library

Born: 1910
Died: 2014
Works: 1

Top works

Property from the estate of Luise Rainer
Saint Joan

via Open Library + Wikidata

Film & TV

Acting · Düsseldorf, Germany

Luise Rainer (/ˈraɪnər/; January 12, 1910 – December 30, 2014) was a German-American film actress. She was the first actor to win more than one Academy Award; at the time of her death she was the longest-lived Oscar recipient. Her training began in Germany from the age of 16 by leading stage director Max Reinhardt. After a few years, she became recognized as a "distinguished Berlin stage…

Known for

Yellowface: Asian Whitewashing and Racism in Hollywood — (archive footage)2019
Luise Rainer: Live from the TCM Classic Film Festival2011
Hollywood Chinese — Self2007
Ziegfeld on Film — Herself (interviewee, and in clips from The Great Ziegfeld)2004
Poem: I Set My Foot Upon the Air and It Carried Me — Actor - Gesang Der Geister Über Den Wassern2003
The Gambler — Grandmother1997
Frank Capra's American Dream — Self (archive footage)1997
That's Entertainment! III — (archive footage)1994
Brisant — Self1994
MGM: When the Lion Roars1992

via TMDB

Music · MusicBrainz

Type: Person
Country: DE
Active from: 1965-10-25

via MusicBrainz · CC0

Listeners · Last.fm

Listeners: 10
Total plays: 158

via Last.fm · Luise Rainer

Recent publications · Crossref

5 total works indexed

Differential Evolution – A Simple and Efficient Heuristic for global Optimization over Continuous Spaces
· 1997 · cited 24,700x
Overview of the High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) Standard
· 2012 · cited 7,486x
<i>Gaia</i> Data Release 2
· 2018 · cited 7,445x
α-Synuclein in Lewy bodies
· 1997 · cited 7,122x
Observation of a new particle in the search for the Standard Model Higgs boson with the ATLAS detector at the LHC
· 2012 · cited 6,794x

via Crossref · CC0

Quotes

“I was nobody to make a pass to. I was very thin like a boy and I was very un-sexy.”
“I was never proud of anything. I just did it like everything else. To do a film - let me explain to you - it's like having a baby. You labor, you labor, you labor, and then you have it. And then it grows up and it grows away from you. But to be proud of giving birth to a baby? Proud? No, every cow can do that.”
“I don’t believe in acting. I think that people in life act, but when you are on the stage, or in my case also on screen, you have to be true.”
“For my second and third pictures I won Academy Awards. Nothing worse could have happened to me.”
“The secret of a long life is to never trust a doctor.”
“I'll tell you a wonderful story. 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.”

via Wikiquote · CC BY-SA

~25 min read

Encyclopedic overview

Luise Rainer (/ˈraɪnər/ RY-nər, German: [ˈʁaɪnɐ]; 12 January 1910 – 30 December 2014) was a German-born 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 (and the longest-lived female star from Classic Hollywood), a superlative that has not been exceeded, as of 2026.

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.

Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “Luise Rainer” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.