Luise Rainer - Later Life and Career

Later Life and Career

While in Europe, Rainer studied medicine and explained she loved being accepted as "just another student", rather than as the screen actress. Meanwhile, she also returned to the stage and made her first appearance at the Palace Theatre, Manchester on May 1, 1939 as Françoise in Jacques Deval's play Behold the Bride, and her first London appearance at the Shaftesbury Theatre on May 23, 1939 in the same part. Returning to America, she made her first appearance on the New York stage at the Music Box Theatre in May 1942 as Miss Thing in J. M. Barrie's A Kiss for Cinderella.

In World War II, she signed a visa affidavit to get Bertolt Brecht out of Nazi Germany because she "loved his poetry". In return, he wrote the role of Grusha Vashnadze in his 1944 play The Caucasian Chalk Circle for Rainer. However they had a disagreement and she never played it.

She made one more film appearance in Hostages in 1943 and abandoned film making in 1944 after marrying publisher Robert Knittel. She initially did not plan on returning to the screen, but explained her comeback in 1943 by saying: "All the professor and the other students cared about was whether I could answer the questions, not whether I could come to class looking glamorous. But after that brief return to the stage, I began to realize that all the doors which had been opened to me in Europe, and all the work I had been able to accomplish for refugee children, was due to the fact that people knew me from my screen work. I began to feel a sense of responsibility to a job which I had started and never finished. When I also felt, after that experience at Dennis, that perhaps I did have talent after all, and that my too-sudden stardom was not just a matter of happy accident, I decided to go back."

When Rainer returned to Hollywood, her contract at MGM had long expired and she had no agent. David Rose, head of Paramount Pictures, offered her to star in an English film shot on location, but war conditions prevented her from accepting the role. Instead, Rose suggested her in 1942 to take a screen test for the lead role in For Whom the Bell Tolls (1943), but Ingrid Bergman was cast. Rainer eventually settled on a role in the small film Hostages (1943) and told the press about the role: "It's certainly not an Academy Award part, and thank goodness, my bosses don't expect me to win an award with it. No, this is something unspectacular but I hope, a step back in the right direction."

Rainer had become an American citizen in the 1940s, but she and Knittel had lived in the UK and Switzerland for most of their marriage. Robert Knittel died in 1989. They had one daughter, Francesca Knittel, now known as Francesca Knittel-Bowyer. Rainer now lives in Eaton Square, London, in an apartment in the same building once inhabited by fellow two-time Oscar winner Vivien Leigh.

Federico Fellini enticed her to play the cameo role of the writer Dolores in his 1960 Oscar-winning classic La Dolce Vita, to the point of her travelling to the Rome location. She quit the production prior to shooting, a fact attributed either to her resistance to an unwanted sex scene, or to her insistence on overseeing her own dialogue. The role was cut from the eventual screenplay.

Rainer made sporadic television and stage appearances following her and her husband's move to Britain, appearing in an episode of the World War II television series Combat! in 1965. She took a dual role in a 1983 episode of The Love Boat. For the latter she received a standing ovation from the crew. She appeared in The Gambler (1997) in a small role, marking her film comeback at the age of 86. She made appearances at the 1998 and 2003 Academy Awards ceremonies as part of special retrospective tributes to past Oscar winners.

In 1982, Rainer was awarded The George Eastman Award, given by George Eastman House for distinguished contribution to the art of film.

On 12 January 2010, Rainer celebrated her centenary in London. Actor Sir Ian McKellen was one of her guests. During that month, she was present at the British Film Institute tribute to her at the National Film Theatre, where she was interviewed by Richard Stirling before screenings of The Good Earth and The Great Waltz. She also appeared onstage at the National Theatre, where she was interviewed by Sir Christopher Frayling. In April 2010 she returned to Hollywood to present a TCM festival screening of The Good Earth.

Rainer has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6300 Hollywood Boulevard. On 24 February 2011, at the age of 101, she said in an interview to BBC Radio 4 that the Oscars were not as ostentatious as they are now. She also said that she saw the film The King's Speech and found it "marvellous".

On September 5, 2011, Rainer travelled to Berlin, Germany to receive a star on the "Boulevard der Stars". Her star was the twenty first issued in 2011 and followed twenty that were issued in 2010. The star was issued as an exception and not without controversy. Rainer had been forgotten when the Boulevard der Stars opened in 2010, despite being Germany's only Academy Award winning actress. In 2011 she was initially rejected by the jury (Senta Berger, Gero Gandert, Uwe Kammann, Dieter Kosslick & Hans Helmut Prinzler) despite being nominated. A prolonged campaign started in October 2010, led by music executive Paul DH Baylay, who noticed Rainer's omission on the Boulevard. Baylay campaigned in Germany, lobbying press and politicians to support the campaign to have the actress and her work recognised. The campaign was supported by The Central Council of Jews. In August 2011, The Boulevard der Stars, finally relented acknowledging the Facebook, email and letter campaign led by Baylay was key in their decision to awarding an extra star in favour of Rainer.