Luise Rainer

 Luise Rainer (January 12, 1910 – December 30, 2014)

She was the first actor to win more than one Academy Award and, with that, the first to win back-to-back. Rainer is also the only person (along with Jodie Foster) to win two Oscars before the age of 30. Rainer started her acting career in Germany at age 16, under the tutelage of 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 highly praised the quality of her acting. 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 predicted she might become another Greta Garbo, MGM's leading female star at the time. Her first American film role was in Escapade in 1935. The following year she was given a supporting part in the musical biography The Great Ziegfeld, where, despite limited appearances, her emotion-filled performance so impressed audiences that she was awarded the Oscar for Best Actress. For her next role, producer Irving Thalberg was convinced, despite the studio's disagreement, that she would also be able to play the part of a poor, plain Chinese farm wife in The Good Earth (1937), which earned her another Academy award. However, she later stated nothing worse could have happened to her than winning two consecutive Oscars, as audience expectations from then on would be too high to fulfill.

After a string of insignificant roles, MGM and Rainer became disappointed, leading her to end her brief three-year film career, soon returning to Europe. It's likely that her career was also stifled by the untimely death of Thalberg, who watched over her at MGM, as well as poor career advice from her then husband. She was married twice, and had one child. Rainer died at her London home on December 30, 2014, at the age of 104 from pneumonia.