Sometimes I feel like a cryptkeeper, always burying the dead. But today a chance to light 100 birthday candles for Luise Rainer, winner of back-to-back Oscars for The Great Ziegfeld (1936) and The Good Earth (1937). She said the feat killed her career, but it gave her a kind of immortality as a trivia quiz answer, and I'm not sure anyone will ever equal her status of the oldest living Academy Award winner. (Not that I wouldn't like to see someone try.) You can see those 70-plus-year-old credits tonight on TCM. I missed her comeback on a 1983 Love Boat episode, but I did see her in The Gambler, from 1997--the same year her contemporary, Gloria Stuart, took a return trip on Titanic. She hits the century mark on July 4. You go, girls!
No comments:
Post a Comment