Monday Minute
No. 177 | October 11, 2010

Living Legends

In looking to feature living actors who are 90 and older, I soon realized there were more candidates than I could cover in a single week.  For that reason they are split in two.  The featured actors for last week were all men.  This week will be all women.

For what it’s worth, the two groups have a couple of distinct differences.  For the most part, the men are still active, working into their 90s.  The women, mostly, retired from the movie business a long time ago.  Four of the men have a living spouse, and even the ones who were married multiple times usually have had a long marriage sometime in the life, several of them married more than fifty years.  None of the women has a living husband, and none has had one for at least the past couple of decades.  Make of that what you will.

Two of the actors from last week have won Oscars, including one Honorary Academy Award.  Among the actresses for the upcoming week, three are Oscar winners, including today’s featured star.  (She, in fact, has lived beyond her 90s, so this week we have a new theme title.)

Our theme this week
Living actresses who are 90 and older

Luise Rainer

Born January 12, 1910
Age 100

Centennials are usually marked for people who are long gone.  Not the case for Luise Rainer.  Still with us, she was able to celebrate her 100th this January.

Rainer was born in Düsseldorf and raised in Hamburg and Vienna.  In her teens she joined the theater company of prominent director Max Reinhardt.  She worked on the stage in Berlin and Vienna, and she also made three German films.  She won raves and earned a reputation for distinguished work.  With the rise of Hitler and of anti-Semitism, she fled Europe at the age of 25, signing a Hollywood contract with MGM.

Her English-language debut was Escapade (1935), opposite William Powell, and during production she met her husband-to-be, writer Clifford Odets.  Next came the two films on which her legacy rests.  She costarred with Powell and Myrna Loy in The Great Ziegfeld (1936).  Rainer played Anna Held, famous star of the Ziegfeld Follies (the film presented a sanitized version of the true-life relationship between Held and Ziegfeld, who never married).  Though not a big part, she won Best Actress.  The logical choice to play O-Lan in Irving Thalberg’s production of The Good Earth (1937), adapted from the Pearl S. Buck book, might have been Anna May Wong, but with Paul Muni set to play Wang Lung, Rainer was cast as the female lead.  She played a humble Chinese slave who has hardly a line of dialogue.  The role was very unlike her glamorous image, and the performance may be better known now for its trivia, rather than cinematic, value.  Rainer won her second consecutive Best Actress award, becoming the first two-time Oscar winner in any acting category.  (Rainer won despite competition from Greta Garbo, who was up for Camille that year, one of the more baffling picks in Oscar history.)

Rainer claimed the back-to-back awards were a curse, and her career quickly declined.  (Irving Thalberg, a champion of hers, had died soon after filming of The Good Earth had wrapped, and that may have been a factor too.)  Rainer played the wife of Johann Strauss II in The Great Waltz (1938), her last hit.  Four other MGM films were duds.  She starred in Paramount’s Hostages in 1943, and that marked the close of her Hollywood film career.  She turned down Fellini when he offered her a role in La Dolce Vita.  Decades later, she took a small role in a European production, The Gambler (1997), a film about Fyodor Dostoyevsky.

Luise Rainer now lives in London, where she attended a British Film Institute tribute marking her 100th birthday this year.

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The Great Ziegfeld (1936)
Robert Z. Leonard, director
William Anthony McGuire, writer
Luise Rainer as Anna Held, William Powell as Flo Ziegfeld
Several scenes

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The Good Earth (1937)
Sidney Franklin, director
Pearl S. Buck (novel), Talbot Jennings, Tess Slesinger, Claudine West (screenplay); writers
Karl Freund, cinematographer
Luise Rainer as O-Lan

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Quote of note
“When I go back in that house, it will be with my son in my arms.  I’ll have a red coat on him, and red flower trousers, and a hat with a gilded Buddha and tiger-faced shoes, and I’ll go into the kitchen where I spent my days as a slave and into the great hall where the old mistress sits with her pipe, and I’ll show myself and my son to all of them.”
—O-Lan (Luise Rainer), The Good Earth (1937)

…58…59…60.