Luise Rainer

Luise Rainer (12 January 1910 – 30 December 2014) was a German and American film actress. She was the first actor to win multiple Academy Awards and the first actress to win them consecutively. The accomplishment was later matched by Katharine Hepburn in the late 1960s; Spencer Tracy in the 1930s and Tom Hanks in the 1990s won consecutive awards for best actor.

At the time of her death, she was the longest-lived individual ever to have received an Academy Award.

Rainer began acting in Germany at age 16, being trained by Austria's leading stage director, Max Reinhardt. Within a few years, she had become a distinguished Berlin stage actress with Reinhardt's Vienna theater ensemble. Critics "raved" about her acting quality. After years of acting on stage and in films in Austria and Germany, she was discovered by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer talent scouts, who signed her to a three-year contract in Hollywood in 1935. A number of filmmakers envisioned she might become another Greta Garbo, MGM's leading female star at the time.