A German Jew, she may well have lost family and relatives in the Holocaust. She became a US citizen in the early 1940s, but has long been a resident of the UK so it is not clear if she remained a US citizen. Married to (one-time) Communist playwright Clifford Odets, she endured a tumultuous and turbulent marriage which ended in divorce. Mistreated by Hollywood, yet a survivor and a guest at the 70th Academy Awards show which brought back old Oscar winners

Once this delicate, darkhaired Austrian actress had won two consecutive Oscars-for her turns as showgirl Anna Held in the lavish biography The Great Ziegfeld (1936) and a patient Chinese wife in the distinguished adaptation of Pearl Buck's The Good Earth (1937)-the remainder of her career was anticlimactic. Plagued with personal problems, and unwilling to be "molded" by Hollywood, she turned on her heels and never looked back. On stage from childhood in her native country, Rainer worked with the great Max Reinhardt and appeared in a handful of German films before coming to Hollywood in 1935. She signed with MGM, which immediately put her in Escapade and then boosted her into bigger roles. Following The Good Earth Rainer was seen in The Emperor's Candlesticks, Big City (both 1937), The Toy Wife, The Great Waltz and Dramatic School (all 1938)-most of them casting her in similar parts calling for a naive, almost schoolgirlish charm. Married to the brilliant but troubled playwright Clifford Odets at the time, she forsook her career in Hollywood, and made only one more film, Hostages (1943, a grim story of wartime Czech resistance), before retiring from the screen. She returned to Hollywood in the 1980s, was feted and interviewed, appeared in a 1983 episode of "The Love Boat" (in a dual role, no less) and made a TV movie in Switzerland, A Dancer (1988).

SPOUSE:

Clifford Odets (1937 - 1940) (divorced)

Robert Knittel (1945 - ?) (his death); 1 child