For a brief time Rainer's star promised to shine brightly alongside fellow MGM stars Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford and Norma Shearer, but she could not survive the backlash of her sudden success. As her marriage to Clifford Odets disintegrated, so did her career, and she left MGM after only eight pictures in three and a half years, interrupting her hiatus only once to film "Hostages" (1943) for Paramount. Happily married to English publisher Robert Knittel until his death in 1989, Rainer made sporadic stage and TV appearances through the years and developed her talents as a painter before returning for her "second act" with 11 riveting screen minutes in Karoly Makk's "The Gambler" (1997). As the wealthy grandmother of a family already close to ruin, she is radiant one moment, bereft the next, so feverishly animated that you cannot take your eyes off her.