Which actress was the first performer to win back-to-back Academy Awards?

Luise Rainer was the first performer to win back-to-back Academy Awards.

Rainer won Best Actress for The Great Ziegfeld at the 9th Academy Awards, honoring her performance as stage star Anna Held. The following year she won again for The Good Earth, playing O-Lan, a quiet Chinese farm wife. The roles were dramatically different: the first emphasized emotional theatricality, while the second relied heavily on restraint and limited dialogue.

Her consecutive victories made her the first actor or actress to win Oscars in two successive ceremonies. Katharine Hepburn later matched the achievement with wins for Morning Glory and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, but not until roughly three decades later. Rainer’s other major early screen role was in The Good Earth opposite Paul Muni.

The wins also became a cautionary Hollywood story. Rainer later said that receiving two Oscars so early created expectations she could not easily meet. After a short MGM career, she returned largely to European and stage work. Her rapid rise and retreat helped make her one of the classic examples of an actor whose early awards success did not translate into lasting studio stardom.