The oldest living Oscar winner, Luise Rainer, has died in London at age 104.  She won back-to-back Oscars in 1936 for The Great Ziegfeld and in 1937 for The Good Earth, the first person ever to win Oscars in consecutive years.  Then, in 1938, she essentially retired from acting, making only a handful of movie and TV appearances in almost eighty years.

There is much to consider about Luise Rainer, for all it’s hard to do much of a retrospective of a career that ended the year my father was born.  For one thing, there’s the fact that she willingly walked away.  I’ll admit I don’t know much about her, but I read a book once about the film industry that, while a work of fiction, referred to her as being famously mishandled.  This could be true, though I believe I also read somewhere that she just wasn’t all that interested in the industry.  She had to be forced to attend the 1936 ceremony when Louis B. Mayer found out she’d won.  She later said winning those two Oscars was probably the worst thing that happened to her.

However, when I think of her (a thing I admittedly don’t do often, and I’ve even actually seen The Great Ziegfeld), I think of her as a link to Old Hollywood.  After all, she won an Oscar for playing a Chinese peasant, and she was born in Germany.  This is less likely to happen now–though you would still get Chinese actors playing Korean peasants and so forth, even today.  And she won her Oscar in a time when a studio head could find out in advance that his actress (and it was the studio system, so “his” actress) had won and get her to the ceremony in time to accept it.  In later years, whenever they’d do assemblages of Oscar winners, Rainer would attend just so people would know she wasn’t dead.

On another site I frequent, we are discussing the concept of “nosthedony,” a word invented by Brian Aldiss as a sort of opposite to nostalgia; he defines it as “the pleasure of returning to the past.”  Luise Rainer was our past as film buffs.  Olivia de Havilland is still alive, but I mention this with the sort of hesitant determination that comes of knowing that John Adams’ last words, several hours after the death of Thomas Jefferson, were “Jefferson survives.”