Luise Rainer

1 portrait by Angus McBean

© estate of Angus McBean / National Portrait Gallery, London

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Luise Rainer

by Angus McBean
vintage bromide print, 1938
15 1/2 in. x 19 1/2 in. (394 mm x 494 mm) sight
Purchased, 2008
Primary Collection
NPG P1307

Sitterback to top

  • Luise Rainer (1910-2014), Actress and painter; centenarian. Sitter in 5 portraits.

Artistback to top

  • Angus McBean (1904-1990), Photographer. Artist or producer associated with 283 portraits, Sitter in 79 portraits.

Linked publicationsback to top

  • Pepper, Terence, Angus McBean Portraits, 2006 (accompanying the exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery from 5 July to 22 October 2006), p. 54 Read entry

    Born in Düsseldorf, Germany, actress Luise Rainer first appeared on the stage there in 1928 and later became a member of Max Reinhardt's company in Berlin, before travelling to Hollywood in 1935, where she was heralded as a second Greta Garbo. Rainer won the Best Actress Academy Award in successive years for her roles in The Great Ziegfeld (1936) and as O-Lan in The Good Earth (1937). This meteoric rise was not sustained and she later moved to London. She made her English stage debut as Françoise in Behold the Bride, first at the Palace Royal, Manchester, and then the Shaftesbury Theatre, London, in May 1939. McBean noted to Helmut Gernsheim, 'How lovely to photograph a woman who has no wrong angle and skin like satin.' He photographed Rainer again in the 1940s.

Events of 1938back to top

Current affairs

Britain pursues its policy of appeasement. At the Munich Agreement, Britain, France and Italy agreed to allow Hitler to seize the Sudetenland area of Czechoslovakia. The agreement was seen at the time as a triumph for peace, with Neville Chamberlain returning home brandishing the paper agreement and saying 'peace for our time.' Within six months Germany had occupied the rest of Czechoslovakia.

Art and science

Graham Greene publishes Brighton Rock. The novel follows the descent of Pinky, a teenage gang leader in Brighton's criminal underworld. The book examines the criminal mind and explores the themes of morality and sin - recurrent concerns for the Roman Catholic Author.
Glasgow hosts the Empire Exhibition; an £11 million celebration of the British Empire visited by 13 million people.

International

In its pursuit of 'Lebensraum' (living space), Germany annexes Austria and parts of Czechoslovakia with little opposition from the League of Nations. At home, the Nazis continued their escalating persecution of the Jews with 'Kristallnacht' (the Night of Broken Glass), attacking Jewish homes, shops, businesses and synagogues, and taking Jewish men to concentration camps.

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