Luise Rainer

Posted on by Tony CrawleyCategories:Actors

  1. Joan Crawford, The Bride Wore Red,  1935. 

    Rashômon time…

    Story One, circa 1937:   Rainer withdrew from  The Girl from Trieste  when – after the sudden death of MGM’s production genius  Irving Thalberg – LB Mayer took over and  insisted playwright Ference Molnár’s heroine be no longer a hooker but a dark Cinderella !

    Story Two, circa 1976 in  the New York  Times:  “I thought I was going to direct Luise Rainer in Molnár’s intimate case history of a young girl who is forced to take to the streets,” said director Dorothy Arzner.  “I was out scouting locations when I got the news that  Miss Rainer had been suspended for marrying a Communist  [playwright  Clifford Odets] and that Joan  would replace her in the movie.”  

    Impressed with the way in Hollywood’s first woman director made  Rosalind Russell  a star in Craig’s Wife. LB then spieled Arzner into an MGM contract in the hope that she could alter Joan Crawford’s unpopular image. “Joan had been a hey-hey girl and the public didn’t seem to want that anymore.” LB re-named the movie and Arzner realised “it  would be synthetic, but Mayer knelt down, with those phony tears in his eyes, and said : We’ll be eternally grateful to the woman who brings Crawford back. I never liked that man; he wasn’t honest and he didn’t keep his promises. He used to duck out the back door of his office when he saw me coming.”   Film flopped and  Crawford was labelled  box-office poison. 


  2. Rose Stradner, The Last Gangster, 1936.       OK, title role goes to Edward G Robinson. Like who else? But who should be his wife?   Rainer was top choice. (Perfect!). Then, MGM tried to borrow Anna Sten from Grand National. Finally, the Austrian Stradner (refusing to be re-named Ann Marlow for movies) made the first of her three only Hollywood movies. Well, she had wed the latest Metro writer-producer-director-genius, Joseph L Mankiewicz.   His “it’s going to be a bumpy night”  scene in his All About Eve was based on “a very despondent and unhappy” Rose.
  3. Annabella, Bridal Suite, 1938.       Some  movies get put on  hold for a lengthy period. This honeymoon caper nearly rolled in 1936 with Luise. 
  4. Maureen O’Sullivan, Port of Seven Seas, 1937.    Or Madelon, Life on the Waterfront and Man of the Waterfront when MGM bought the Marcel Pagnol story for Rainer – before deciding O’Sullivan was better suited to its take on the Pagnol Marseille classic trilogy.  The heroine’s  name – indeed, the title of her story – was changed as Metro suits (the types using casting couches) were perturbed by the word Fanny – used in America  for the behind or bottom and in the UK for vagina.  ButFanny it was, for the 1960 Warner Bros version.
  5. Franciska Gaal, The Girl Downstairs, 1937.  Rainer passed making this the second of three Hollywood films starring the Hungarian Jewish refugee from  Nazi Germany  – reprising her Catherine The Last role made in Austria the year before by Norman Taurog, future director of… wait for it…  nine Elivis Presley “films:”  Amazingly, Gaael went home in 1940, hiding out in ruined buildings. Finding film roles no more plentiful than in LA, she returned to Ameri  in 1947. Must be a film in her story…
  6. Margaret Sullivan, Three Comrades, 1938.      Rainer was  the girl among the three German soldiers (comrades not yet a suspicious word in Hollywood)  until Sullavan took over…  in F Scott Fitzgerald’s sole screeenwriting credit. 
  7. Rita Hayworth, The Lady In  Question, 1941.      Luise was considered but Rita’s sleek pin-ups made her a more valuable property   – even when on trial for murder   in the   remake of the French Gribouille. LB Mayer had kept his promise when the first actress to win two consecutive Oscars quit MGM. “Luise, we’ve made you and we’re going to kill you.”   She rasped:   “I was already a star on the stage before   I came here… You’re now 60 and I’m 20. When I’m 40, the age of a successful actress, you will be dead and I will live.”   Close.   Mayer died when she was 47
  8. Martha Scott, They Dare Not Love, 1940.       The Hollywood Reporter gossiped abut  Columbia negotiating with Rainer when it actually borrowed Scott from (future Tarzan producer) Sol Lesser.
  9. Gene Tierney, The Shanghai Gesture, 1942.        She as lucky to lose the lead – and this bashing from New York Times critic Bosley Crowther. “It is so utterly and lavishly pretentious, so persistently opaque and so very badly acted in every leading role but one that its single redeeming feature is that it finally becomes laughable.”
  10. Ingrid Bergman, For Whom The Bell Tolls, 1942.      Barbara Britton, Frances Farmer, Betty Field, Paulette Goddard, Susan Hayward and  Barbara Stanwyck were seen for Gary Cooper’s gal. Plus the French Annabella, Mexico’s Esther Fernández,  true Brit  Vivien Leigh and Germany’s Luise Rainer and Vera Zorina. However, Ernest Hemingway insisted on Bergman (and Cooper) because  he’d had them in mind when writing the book. In case Ingrid  changed her mind, producer-director Sam Wood had  the Austro-Hungarian Lenora Aubert waiting in the wings

  11. Katharine Hepburn,  Dragon Seed, 1943.        Insulting! Pearl Buck’s book had a point – exposing Japanese atrocities in China.  MGM made it a farce, with the unlikeliest-looking Chinese family ever spawned by Hollywood. Ttaped eyelids for Hepburn, Huston, Aline MacMahon, Akim Tamiroff…  Greer Garson and Hedy Lamarr failed their Eurasian tests for Hepburn’s Jade Tan.  The German-born Rainer, of course, famously won the first ever  second (consecutive) Oscar  in 1938  for playing the Chinese O-Lan in a far better MGM version of a previous  Pearl Buck book, The Good Earth.
  12. Anna Sten, Three Russian Girls, 1943.      After early hopes about Garbo and Michele Morgan as Red Cross volunteer nurses Natasha and Tamara, Rainer was set (momentarily) – opposite Mimi Fortsythe’s Tamara – in the US re-make of the 1941 Russian film, The Girl From Leningrad.
  13. Ruth Warrick, China Sky, 1944.     Rainer, Claudette Colbert, Ellen Drew, Margo, Maureen O’Hara were early choices to fight over Pearl Buck’s medical hero, Paul Henreid or Randolph Scott. Finally. Warrick and Scott melo-ed.  But New York Times critic Bosley Crowther was adament: “This is a case where 10,000 words would have been better than one picture.”
  14. Helen Walker, Nightmare Alley, 1947.          Ya cayn’t always get wot ya wanna… In  handwritten note dated February 1947, head Fox Darryl Zanuck suggested Rainer, Constance Bennett or even Marlene Dietrich as Lilith… amid all the degradation, adultery, alcoholism, murder, larceny, spiritualism, high-stakes cons, and child abuse (listed New York Sun critic Gary Giddins in 2005)  set against the Depression scrim of anarchy, racism, desperation, and top-down corruption. Not many laughs, then.
  15. Joan Fontaine, Ivanhoe, 1951.       When first planned in  the mid-30s, MGM aimed to squeeze too many contract stars into unlikely roles in Sir Walter Scott’s 12th Century, Robin Hoodish tale of chivalrous knights, warring Saxons, Normans, Christians and Jews.  Such as Rainer as  Ivanhoe’s childhood sweetheart,  the prim and proper (not to say cold and distant) Saxon heiress, Lady Rowena.
  16. Audrey McDonald La Dolce Vita, Italy-France, 1960.        Luise hadn’t filmed for 15 years when Italian maestro Federico Fellini begged in 1958:   “I need your poetic face.” She thought his script “pure nonsense.” He loved her re-writes – “but you must fuck Mastroianni.”   Instead, K‡roly Makk persuaded her back, 55 years after her last Hollywood film, in Hungary’s The Gambler, 1997,   at an ageless 87.
  17. Gale Sondergaard, Return  of a Man Called Horse, 1975.   Exec producer Sandy Howard had his eye on Rainber for his sequel. But Elk Woman  bewcaMme the fifrst major Hollywood film rôle for Sondergaard since being blacklisted by the top-brass studios… since 1951.
  18. Katharine Hepburn, Love Affair, 1993.      One veteran for another.  Luise was first reserve in case Kate Hepburn did not fall for the famed seductive powers of the producer, co-star and co-scenarist Warren Beatty.  She had retired ten years earlier but he conquered her nerves by renting an LA house, finding a good  dermatologist and, best of all, changing the character from the previous two films of the same story from a grandmother to his aunt. That’s  how La Hepburn uttered the F Word for the first time in her 51 screen roles.

    >>>> Tribute

    “By picking the fight with Louis B Mayer that ended her career in Hollywood she was protecting her art, not surrendering it. And of course she wasn’t prepared to baste the turkeys which Mayer started sending her way. A very good lesson, and a hard one to follow. Thumbing her nose in the way that she did tells you quite how strong she was. She was deadly serious about acting. she didn’t think much of Clark Gable, she adored William Powell and Paul Muni and John Gilbert.” – actor friend, Patrick Kennedy, The Guardian, January 2015;  they met when she as 99.  He was 33.


 Birth year: 1910Death year: 2014Other name: Casting Calls:  18