Luise Rainer

Luise Rainer trained in the theater of Max Reinhardt in Vienna, a serious European stage actress steeped in a tradition that prized truth over glamour, when MGM signed her sight-mostly-unseen as a possible successor to Greta Garbo. She was small, dark-eyed, intense, and utterly unlike the studio's blonde ideal, and for a moment that difference made her a sensation.

In The Great Ziegfeld (1936) she had only a supporting role, but a single scene made her career: as the showman's discarded first wife, she telephones to congratulate him on his remarriage, her voice cracking into false brightness while her face collapses. The so-called telephone scene won her the Academy Award for Best Actress. The following year she won again, transformed almost beyond recognition as O-Lan, the mute, enduring Chinese peasant wife in The Good Earth (1937), a performance of stillness and suffering that seemed to erase the actress entirely. No one had ever taken the prize two years running.

And then, astonishingly, it was over. Rainer chafed under the factory discipline of MGM and clashed bitterly with studio chief Louis B. Mayer, who she felt was burying her in unworthy roles. She believed the back-to-back Oscars had made her a target rather than a treasure, later speaking of an Oscar curse. Within a few years she had left Hollywood almost entirely, her film career effectively finished before she turned thirty.

She outlived nearly everyone who had doubted or exploited her, settling in London, marrying a publisher, painting, traveling, and making only rare, chosen returns to acting. She died at 104, by then the last surviving star of the 1930s studio system and the longest-lived Academy Award winner in history. Her career stands as one of cinema's strangest parabolas: a meteor who claimed its highest honor twice and then chose, deliberately, to fall silent.