Luise Rainer - ©Theda Bara

The first actress I bring in the year 2024, if she were alive, would turn 114 years old in January, something that wouldn't even be an impossible mission for her, considering she lived a long 104 years.

Her name is Luise Rainer, an actress who lived a long life and enchanted the cinema with great class and elegance. Luise, a German-American-British woman, was the first actress to win two consecutive Oscars for Best Actress. He is considered one of the 500 great cinema legends by the American Film Institute.

As I said, the actress won the Oscar for best actress on two occasions, 1937 and 1938, for her performance in the films: “The Great Ziegfeld” (1936) playing the character “Anna Held” and “The Good Land” (1937) playing a Chinese woman “O-Lan”, having to put on makeup for hours to characterize the character in the saga of the Chinese couple “O-Lan and Wang Lung”, played by Ukrainian actor Paul Muni (1895-1967).

Luise Rainer has her star on the Los Angeles Walk of Fame, at Hollywood Boulevard: 6300, Cinema category.

Luise was born on January 12, 1910, in Düsseldorf, Germany, and died on December 30, 2014, in London, United Kingdom, at the age of 104.

The actress was married twice. Her first marriage was to American playwright, theater director, screenwriter and actor Clifford Odets (1906-1963) from 1937 to 1940; her second and last marriage was to the British editor Robert Knittel (1919-1989) from 1945 to 1989, with whom she had her only daughter, the former New York actress, journalist and writer Francesca Knittel-Bowyer (1946-) who wrote and edited her mother's biography: “Seen from the Wings: Luise Rainer My Mother, The Journey”, in 1989. Luise Rainer was widowed at the age of 79 and continued to live alone.