Luise Rainer Articles

Frank Capra, Luise Rainer, George Jessel Luise Rainer turns 102 today, January 12. She is the oldest living Academy Award winner in the acting categories, having won two consecutive Best Actress Oscars for The Great Ziegfeld (1936) and The Good Earth (1937). Because of both her longevity and the fact that Turner Classic Movies regularly shows nearly all of her films, the Dusseldorf-born (some sources [...]

Vanessa Redgrave Academy Salute: From Pariah to Honoree [Photo: Vanessa Redgrave, bearing an uncanny resemblance to Natasha Richardson, as ballerina Isadora Duncan in Isadora.] Later on, at the behest of producer Daniel Melnick (Straw Dogs, Making Love) screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky (The Goddess, Network) prefaced his announcement of the Best Screenwriting Oscar with the following (also via Inside Oscar): Before I get on to the writing [...]

Luise Rainer as Anna Held, The Great Ziegfeld Best Picture Academy Award winner The Great Ziegfeld (1936) will be screening tonight at 7:30 p.m. at the American Cinematheque's Aero Theater in Santa Monica. Robert Z. Leonard directed this sumptuous MGM production, starring William Powell as theatrical showman Florenz "Flo" Ziegfeld, Myrna Loy as Ziegfeld's wife Billie Burke (the good witch Glinda in The Wizard of [...]

Jackie Cooper as Jim Hawkins, Lionel Barrymore as Billy Bones in Victor Fleming's Treasure Island Jackie Cooper Dies: Youngest Best Actor Oscar Nominee, SKIPPY, THE CHAMP A series of programmers followed, among them Two Bright Boys (1939), once again pairing up Jackie Cooper with Freddie Bartholomew — who by then was sliding fast as well — and What a Life (1939), with Betty Field. In [...]