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Luise Rainer was born in 1910 in Dusseldorf, Germany. She became a stage actress in her teens, and she appeared in three German movies, but when Hitler came to power Rainer, who was Jewish, wisely recognized his evil early on, and came to the U.S. in 1935, where she was signed by MGM, the number one studio. Studio head Irving Thalberg was so taken with her talent that he cast her in the lead in Escapade, opposite one of MGM's biggest stars, William Powell. Her follow-up movie was The Great Ziegfeld, again with Powell, and she had the basically minor role of Powell's first wife, Anna Held. But she had one key heartbreaking scene where she talks on the phone to Powell, and the camera is on her the entire scene, and her acting is so memorable that everyone was talking about that as they left the movie. The motion picture Academy had just added the "Best Supporting" categories, and Rainer should have, and would have won that Award, but for unknown reasons MGM used their clout to get Rainer nominated for Best Actress instead, and she won. The following year Thalberg put Rainer in the lead of The Good Earth, his dream project, based on Pearl Buck's best seller about poor farmers in China. Of course, the movie should have starred Anna May Wong, but the studio could not have a non-Asian play love scenes with a real-life Asian (!), and since there was no Asian male star to play opposite her, Wong was out, and Rainer got the lead role of O-Lan. For her husband, Wang Lung, Thalberg acquired Paul Muni from Warners, and Muni had won the Best Actor Oscar the year before, thus pairing both winners from the previous year. Both lead actors, but especially Rainer, used almost no "yellow face" make-up, something that had not been done in similar productions to that time. The movie was first-rate, and Rainer won her second consecutive Best Actress Oscar (Muni did not win, and it may well have been partly because he was NOT an MGM contract actor, and they likely used their clout against him, as they had helped Rainer the year before, and instead MGM helped Spencer Tracy, who WAS under contract to them, to win instead). MGM rushed double winner Rainer into FIVE additional movies in 1937 and 1938, and even though she starred opposite the best MGM stars, including Powell and Tracy, none of the movies were very good or very successful. With World War II beginning, Rainer had her family in Europe to worry about, and given the lackluster state of her film career, she did not mind abandoning MGM, and she returned to the stage, making one more movie in 1943 for Paramount. In 1945, when the war ended she married a rich English publisher, and she lived in retirement ever since, making a very few film and TV appearances, including showing up for two Oscar tributes to past winners, in 1998 and 2003. She was the oldest living Oscar winner until she passed away in 2014 at the age of 104. WAS there an "Oscar jinx" that hurt Rainer's career? I think so, but only in the sense that winning a Best Acting Oscar hurts lots of great actors like F. Murray Abraham or Geoffrey Rush. After that, they can no longer easily take supporting roles, or lead roles in minor movies that might best suit their talents, and instead often get pushed into big budget movies in starring roles that DON'T suit them. More important, right after her second Oscar, Rainer had the terrible double whammy of losing her mentor Irving Thalberg, who died during the filming of The Good Earth, and she also married tortured soul Clifford Odets, and I would bet those two events harmed her career far more than any "jinx"! Incidentally, Odets also had an affair with Frances Farmer while married to Rainer which greatly added to HER rapid decline, so Odets may have the unusual distinction of helping end the careers of two of the finest actresses ever, and at the same time!

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Important Added Info: Note that starting in the very early 1910s (around 1912, when studios realized that people were more likely to go to a movie if it had a star they liked in it), studios created sets of special "personality" posters, which theaters that showed their movies could hang in their lobbies. These had a big advantage over posters for specific movies, because they could be used whenever a movie with that star was shown, which meant they could be used over and over! Because studios realized this, they made these posters on a high quality paper stock, sometimes with a "linen" texture, and sometimes with elaborate border designs, and almost always with great quality color printing. They almost always measured exactly 22" x 28", the same as "half-sheets" (which were then known as "displays", except that they were taller than they were wide, and that the images almost always had a "full bleed", meaning that there were no blank borders. They almost always showed a head and shoulders image of the star, and the image on these posters is often very close to actual life-size! They almost always have the name of the star and the studio they worked for at the bottom. Even though there were many sets of these from many studios over a period of approximately 30 years (they were rarely made after the early 1940s), very few survive, likely partially due to World War II paper drives, and partially due to the fact that they were never folded and the paper they were made of sometimes aged poorly. We at eMoviePoster.com were just consigned a very special collection of 99 of these "personality" posters, which we are auctioning in separate auctions. They were collected starting in the mid 1980s, and the collector who assembled this collection tried to "upgrade" condition whenever possible over the years, so many of them are in excellent condition (sometimes likely the best surviving example), and on the ones where they are in lesser condition, it is because the collector never could find one in better condition! Now he has consigned them to us, and they will find new owners. If they were kept together, they would surely make an incredible display for the walls of any place where lots of people gather, like a museum, a restaurant, or any similar place. Of course, it is more likely that these will find many, many separate new homes, but we hope that they end up publicly displayed wherever they end up!

Note that MGM became a major studio after its creation (through merger) in 1924, and at some point in the 1920s, they created two different sets of personality posters to promote their stars, and in the 1930s, when they had "more stars than there are in Heaven", they created four more sets! You can tell the sets apart in two ways. One is that all of the posters from a set have the same border design and the stars and studio names are written in the same font and layout. The other is that you can look at the age of the star in the image (although that might possibly be deceptive, because they might have sometimes used a slightly younger version of a star!). The MGM sets were likely made every two to three years, and some major stars carried over from set to set, but with the passing years, some stars would be dropped and new stars added. These posters are extremely rare as it is likely few theaters ordered them, and fewer still saved them, and in addition, they could be easily torn, and if they were not stored carefully, they would become fragile, and it is likely many were damaged and discarded for that reason! Note that the high quality paper stock these posters were printed on does not always age very well, and can become fragile (usually resulting in chips around the edges of the poster). Because of their fragile nature and their age, we intend to send all of these personality posters in large flat packages, and never roll them into tubes (unless the buyer insists)! PLEASE DO NOT BID ON THIS POSTER, UNLESS YOU ARE WILLING TO PAY THE COST OF SHIPPING IT IN A LARGE FLAT PACKAGE!

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Bruce Hershenson,
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