"The secret of a long life is to never trust a doctor."
On Jaunary 12th, Luise Rainer will be celebrating her 101st birthday. If that name doesn't ring a bell, it's likely because she left Hollywood behind roughly seventy years ago, after winning back-to-back Best Actress Academy Awards. That Oscar feat had never happened before, and has happened only once since. In celebration, TCM will be airing her appearance at this past April's TCM classic film festival.
Her first Oscar (in only her second American film) was as the high-strung first wife of William Powell's eponymous lead in The Great Ziegfeld. It's not really a great or particularly brilliant film, but it's a great product of the 1930s Hollywood studio system. One of those big prestige biopics with solid performances and an abundance of musical numbers. It's the type of movie that's carefully calibrated to entertain a wide audience while also grabbing awards. It ain't art, exactly, but it's certainly high-class entertainment, and took home the Best Picture Oscar for that year. Not for nothing, it was also 1936's second biggest box office draw. Luise, with her sad eyes and distinctive Austrian accent, makes an indelible impression. The part of Flo Ziegfeld's first wife Anna Held is essentially a light comedy role, but she plays it with a vulnerability that borders on tragic.
Her next film, for which she won her next award, was the adaption of Pearl S. Buck's The Good Earth. The young, German-born, Austria-raised actress played Chinese peasant O-Lan, the soft-spoken female lead. Star Anna May Wong was considered for the role, but anti-race-mixing provisions of the Hays production code made it impossible to cast an Asian-American actor as the wife when thoroughly caucasian Paul Muni had been cast as the male lead. The casting, naturally, seems silly given intervening decades demonstrating that not only white people can be actors, but there you have it. Muni's performance never really breaks through the white-dude-in-makeup thing, but Luise plays the role with the same vulnerability that won her acclaim the year before, and with even greater subtlety given The Good Earth's notable lack of comedy and musical interlude. In any event, it's a way more convincing portrayal of a Chinese peasent than the one that Katherine Hepburn gives in Dragon Seed, a later Buck book to be adapted and caucasianated. The Ain't-I-Chinese? makeup in either case is pretty awful, but Luise gives it her all.
Following The Good Earth, Luise moved away from Hollywood film acting after a few more films. The move was generally of her own accord, but the result of a studio system that didn't allow its stars a lot of creative or financial control. In the years since, she's gone to med school and done a lot of work on the stage, in addition to some sporadic appearances in movies and on television. She's had a pretty interesting life, and there aren't a lot of voices from H-wood's golden age still around. Good genes or good habits? Either way, Happy 101.
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Posted by: anthony | Friday, December 16, 2011 at 05:05 AM