Happy 100th Birthday, Oscar Winner Luise Rainer! (And I Forgive You for Playing O-Lan)
Luise Rainer...who made her screen debut as a teenager and appeared in three other German-language films in the early ‘30s, terminated her European career when the Austrian Adolf Hitler consolidated his power in Germany. With his vicious anti-Semitism, his imposition of a police state in Germany, and his desire for an anschluss between Austria and Der Vaterland, Hitler was a threat to European Jewry. Rainer had been spotted by a talent scout, who offered her a seven-year contract with the American studio Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. The 25-year-old Rainer took the deal and emigrated to the United States.
...During the making of Escapade, Rainer met and fell in love with the left-wing playwright Clifford Odets, then at the height of his fame. They were married in 1937. It was not a happy union...
Rainer would allay any backbiting from Hollywood's bovines over her first Oscar with her performance as O-Lan in MGM producer Irving Thalberg’s spectacular adaptation of Pearl S. Buck’s The Good Earth, the former Boy Wonder's final picture before his untimely death. The role won Rainer her second Best Actress Award. The success of The Good Earth (1937) was rooted in its realism, and its realism was enhanced by Rainer’s acting opposite the legendary Paul Muni as her husband. When Thalberg cast Muni in the role of Wang Lung, he had to abandon any thought of casting the Chinese-American actress Anna May Wong as O-Lan as the Hays Office would not allow the hint of miscegenation, even between an actual Chinese woman and a Caucasian actor in yellow-face drag... [More]
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...During the making of Escapade, Rainer met and fell in love with the left-wing playwright Clifford Odets, then at the height of his fame. They were married in 1937. It was not a happy union...Rainer would allay any backbiting from Hollywood's bovines over her first Oscar with her performance as O-Lan in MGM producer Irving Thalberg’s spectacular adaptation of Pearl S. Buck’s The Good Earth, the former Boy Wonder's final picture before his untimely death. The role won Rainer her second Best Actress Award. The success of The Good Earth (1937) was rooted in its realism, and its realism was enhanced by Rainer’s acting opposite the legendary Paul Muni as her husband. When Thalberg cast Muni in the role of Wang Lung, he had to abandon any thought of casting the Chinese-American actress Anna May Wong as O-Lan as the Hays Office would not allow the hint of miscegenation, even between an actual Chinese woman and a Caucasian actor in yellow-face drag... [More]
SUBSCRIBE TO MY OCCASIONAL NEWSLETTER. CLICK HERE.
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