Luise Rainer - Early Life and Career

Early Life and Career

The daughter of Heinz Rainer and Emmy (née Koenigsberger), Rainer was born in Düsseldorf, Germany and raised in Hamburg, Germany and Vienna, Austria. She once told a reporter: "I was born into a world of destruction. The Vienna of my childhood was one of starvation, poverty and revolution." Her father was a businessman who settled in Europe after spending most of his childhood in Texas, where he was sent at the age of 6 as an orphan (Rainer has stated that because of her father, she is an American citizen "by birth"). Rainer's family was upper-class and Jewish. A number of leading film references list her birthplace as Vienna.

Biographer Margaret Brenman-Gibson writes that Rainer was a premature baby, born two months early. She also had two brothers. Rainer describes her father as being "possessive" and "tempestuous", but whose affections and concern centered on her. Rainer seemed to him as "eternally absent-minded" and "very different." Rainer remembers his "tyrannical possessiveness", and was saddened to see her mother, "a beautiful pianist, and a woman of warmth and intelligence and deeply in love with her husband, suffering similarly".

Although generally shy at home, she was "immensely athletic" in school, becoming a champion runner and an "intrepid" mountain-climber, notes Brenman-Gibson. In addition to expending her energy in athletics, Rainer stated, "I became an actress only because I had quickly to find some vent for the emotion that inside of me went around and around, never stopping." It was her father's wish that she attend a good finishing school and "marry the right man", she remembers. However, her "rebellious" nature made her appear to be more a "tomboy", while at the same time, "happy to be alone", she feared she was "developing her mother's inferiority complex".

She was only six when she decided to be part of the entertainment world, and recalls being inspired by watching a circus act: "I thought that a man on the wire was marvelous, in his spangles and tights. I wanted to run away and marry him but I never had an opportunity. I am sure, though, that the experience first disclosed to me the entertainment world. For years I longed to be able to walk on a tight wire, too."

At age 16 she chose to follow her dream to become an actress. Under the pretext of visiting her mother, Rainer instead traveled to Düsseldorf and registered at the Dumont Theater, having prearranged an audition the same day. She later began studying acting with Max Reinhardt, and by the time she was 18 there was already an "army of critics" who felt that she had "unusual" talent for a young actress. She became a "distinguished Berlin stage actress" acting with Reinhardt's Vienna theater ensemble. She made her first appearance on the stage at the Dumont Theater in 1928, followed by appearances at various theaters in Jacques Deval's play Mademoiselle, Kingsley's Men in White, George Bernard Shaw's Saint Joan, Measure for Measure, and Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author.

She later appeared in several German language films before being discovered in 1934 by MGM talent scout Phil Berg while performing in Six Characters in Search of an Author, who felt that she might appeal to the same audience as Greta Garbo, then one of their most successful performers. Initially, Rainer had no interest in a film career, saying in a 1935 interview: "I never wanted to film. I was only for the theater. Then I saw A Farewell to Arms and right away I wanted to film. It was so beautiful."

Rainer summered with her husband Clifford Odets, Harold Clurman and Elia Kazan, among others, at the Pine Brook Country Club located in the countryside of Nichols, Connecticut which was the summer rehearsal headquarters of the Group Theatre (New York) during the 1930s and 1940s.