Cinema golden era star Luise Rainer, the first to win back-to-back Oscars in the 1930s, died on Tuesday. She was 104. Her daughter, Francesca Knittel-Bowyer, said that she died from pneumonia in her London home.

Rainer left Nazi Germany to pursue her acting career in Hollywood, and she skyrocketed to fame in the 1930s. However, at the highest point in her career, she quit to play roles such as wife and mother. And she occasionally took on stage work.

Rainer’s roles ranged from the 1930s German stage to television’s The Love Boat. She began acting at a young age and became a child star in Vienna and Berlin under the direction of Max Reinhardt. She was signed by an MGM scout in 1934, and one year later, she sailed to America at the age of 25. In 1935, she appeared in her first American picture, Escapade with William Powell.

Two years after arriving in America, Rainer won her first Academy Award as the best actress in 1936 for her performance as Anna Held in MGM’s musical production The Great Ziegfeld. Although her part was small, critics say one telephone scene in which she smiled through tears as she congratulated Mr. Ziegfeld on his engagement won her the Oscar.

In 1937, Rainer won best actress for a second time for her performance as a peasant wife in The Good Earth, an adaptation of the Pearl S. Buck novel.This made her the first to win a top acting award two years in a row. Only Tom Hanks, Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy have matched this feat.

Although Rainer’s fame seemed to be on the rise, her personal life was headed in a downward spiral. She was caught in an unhappy marriage to playwright Clifford Odets in 1937, and she was divorced by 1940.

While her winnings were grand accomplishments to most, Rainer claimed her Oscars were a curse since they raised impossible expectations. She said that the consecutive Oscar winnings were the worst thing to happen to her. In an interview with the Associated Press in 1999, Rainer said that MGM thought her Oscar winnings indicated that she could be thrown into anything.

She starred in five MGM pictures after her winnings, but critics called them a “waste of her talents,” according to the New York Times. She fought with MGM over control of her own career, threw out her contract and left Hollywood for New York. She regarded Hollywood as absurdly materialistic and intellectually shallow. By the early 1940s, her career came to an end.

Eventually, Rainer returned to Europe and studied medicine. She also made a wartime film, Hostages, in 1943 for Paramount and appeared in a handful of plays in London and on Broadway in the next three decades. She took on television roles occasionally and appeared on small headlines. In 1997, she made one more film, playing a Russian dowager, in a British production of The Gambler. 

In 1945, Rainer married Robert Knittel, and they had their daughter Francesca Knittel-Bowyer. For decades, they lived in London. Along with her daughter, Rainer is  survived by tw0 granddaughters and two great-grandchildren. Knittel-Bowyer described Rainer as “bigger than life” and promised that everyone who met her never forgot her.