Two time Oscar-winning actress Luise Rainer, whom you'll probably best recall for having played O-Lan in the adapttion of the Pearl Buck novel The Good Earth, has died two weeks shy of her 105th birthday.
Rainer left Hollywood at the end of the 1930s, but was still active for the rest of her life, showing up at the first TCM Film Festival three months after her 100th birthday in April 2010. She sat down for an interview with TCM host Robert Osborne, but the interview was nearly a disaster when Rainer announced that somewhere on the long flight from London, she had lost her hearing aids, leaving her profoundly deaf. She couldn't hear Robert's questions, but somebody saved the day by handing Robert a pen and notepad. So Robert wrote The Good Earth on the pad and handed it to Luise, who responded in her wonderful low female register voice with just enough of a German accent to make it clear she wasn't a native English speaker, "Oh, you want to know about The Good Earth!" and proceeded to do a half-hour interview.
For those of you who want to see her movies, TCM had a morning and afternoon of her films scheduled for her birthday on Monday January 12. I'd guess they're going to scrap one of the prime time lineups (probably Monday night) to make a 24-hour tribute, and change the order of films like they did for Lauren Bacall back in September.