As Trey pointed out earlier, one of the last icons of Hollywood’s Golden Age has died today. Luise Rainer was 104. 104, can you imagine? After the jump is the legendary single-take “telephone scene” from Ziegfeld Follies that won her the first of her back-to-back Oscars in 1936.
The set-up: Luise plays real-life singer Anna Held who calls her ex-husband (producer Florenz Ziegfeld) to congratulate him on the occasion of his remarriage. Through her tears, she smiles and struggles for composure. She makes it through the short-but-polite conversation, then dissolves into tears after hanging up. It caused a sensation at the time. “So realistic!” “So heartbreaking!” Audiences sobbed right along with her. “It is a moving, poignant tour de force, and the brutal camera does not look away,” said the New York Times.
Of course, watching it now, one has to roll one’s eyes. My, how acting styles have changed. Perhaps, though, this was the first “naturalist” performance, pre-dating Stanislavsky’s “Method” by a couple of decades. Perhaps it was the first step toward a more realistic, intuitive acting style. Whatever it was, it’s hard to see now what audiences saw then.
But it won her that Oscar, and made her into a household name.
From the Times‘ obituary:
A year later, Ms. Rainer won her second best-actress Oscar for the role of O-Lan, the stoical peasant wife in “The Good Earth,” with Paul Muni as her husband, Wang Lung. Adapted from the Pearl S. Buck novel and produced by a dying Irving G. Thalberg, the movie called on Ms. Rainer for another dimension, an all-but-mute yet shattering performance that conveyed the suffering and endurance of China’s millions.
Her second Oscar stunned Hollywood. Greta Garbo, MGM’s leading actress, had been favored for her performance in the title role of “Camille.” For Ms. Rainer, it meant fame and a place in history: the first person to win the top acting award in consecutive years, a feat that would be matched only by Spencer Tracy, Katharine Hepburn, and Tom Hanks.
She seemed to stand on the threshold of greatness. Even her rivals like Carole Lombard, Norma Shearer and Myrna Loy thought so. So did an adoring public. But behind the scenery, Ms. Rainer was deeply unhappy. Her marriage to the volatile playwright Clifford Odets in 1937 was failing, headed for divorce in 1940. (He was absurdly jealous of Albert Einstein, who had been smitten by Ms. Rainer.)
And her career soon went into free fall. She came to regard her Oscars as a curse, raising impossibly high expectations. She made five more pictures for MGM over the next couple of years, but many critics and Ms. Ranier herself called them inferior and a waste of her talents. She said that Louis B. Mayer, the autocratic head of MGM, scoffed at her pleas for serious roles in films of significance.
Beyond unhappiness with her work, Ms. Rainer came to regard Hollywood itself as dysfunctional — intellectually shallow, absurdly materialistic and politically naïve, particularly in what she called its apathy toward the rise of fascism in Europe and Asia, and labor unrest and poverty in Depression America.
She walked out on Mr. Mayer, and her contract was torn up. She was not yet 30, and her meteoric career was all but over. She returned to Europe, studied medicine, aided orphaned refugees of the Spanish Civil War, appeared at war bond rallies in the United States and entertained Allied troops in North Africa and Italy during World War II. She also made one wartime film, “Hostages” (1943), for Paramount.
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