Luise Rainer, the screen legend who the first to win back-to-back Oscars, passed away at her home in London on Tuesday due to pneumonia, her only child, Francesa Knittel-Bowyer broke the news.

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She was 104.

"She was bigger than life and can charm the birds out of the trees," Knittel-Bowyer said. "If you saw her, you'd never forget her," Knittel-Bowyer said of her big-eyed, apple-cheeked mother.  

Rainer, whose career peaked in the 1930s, also held many records, aside from her back-to-back Oscar wins. She was also the longest-living Oscar winner, the last surviving Oscar winning actress from the 1930s, and one of the last surviving screen legends.

Rainer's stint in Hollywood was only short lived, from 1935 until 1938, but her stirring and critically acclaimed performances in such films as The Great Ziegfeld and The Good Earth were so unforgettable that to this day, she is still hailed as one of the finest screen legends of Hollywood's golden era.

Trained by Germany's premier director, Max Reinhardt, Rainer, who was born in Vienna in 1910, started out as a stage performer, building up a reputation as a "distinguished Berlin actress." With her critically acclaimed stage performances, she was signed by MGM for a three-year Hollywood contract, with the anticipation of becoming Tinseltown's next Greta Garbo.

She made her Hollywood debut in Escapade (1935). She may have a small role in The Great Ziegfeld (1936), but as the long-suffering Anna Held, Rainer stole the scene with that unforgettable telephone scene (often hailed as the best in motion picture history) where she congratulated William Powell's character, winning the Oscar for best actress and earning her the sobriquet "Viennese teardrop."

In 1937, she was cast in another challenging role, as the Chinese peasant, O'Lan in the super-production, The Good Earth. With her second Oscar win, she became the first actress to win back-to-back Academy Awards, a record that only Katharine Hepburn managed to match with her 1967-1968 wins.

Her critical and Oscar success marked the peak of career, which eventually went into backlash and spiraled downward, thanks to poor roles and even poorer scripts, that is believed Rainer was the first big time victim of the Oscar curse.

Rainer herself considered her Oscar wins as the worst thing that ever befell her career.

"When I got two Oscars, they thought, 'Oh, they can throw me into anything,' " she said in an interview with Associated Press in 1999.

Disillusioned with the studio system and with her unhappy marriage to playwright Clifford Odets (which lasted from 1937-1940), she decided to end her career in the movies, appearing sporadically on stage.  In 1944, she married publisher Robert Knittel.

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