Profile of Greta Garbo on Famous Like Me

Greta Garbo (September 18, 1905 – April 15, 1990) was a Swedish-American actress.

She was born Greta Lovisa Gustafsson in Stockholm, Sweden, the youngest of three children born to Karl Alfred Gustafsson (1871-1920) and Anna Lovisa Johansson (1872-1944), both of whom were Lutherans. Her older sister and brother were Alva and Sven.

Becoming an actress

When Greta was 14, her father, to whom she was extremely close, died, and her relationship with her mother was, at best, strained. Consequently, she was forced to leave school and go to work. Her first job was as a lather girl in a barbershop. She then became a clerk in a department store, where she would also model for newspaper advertisements. Her first motion picture aspirations came when she appeared in an advertising shot for the department store where she worked. That led to another short movie, which was seen by comedy director Eric Petscher. He cast her in a small part for the movie Peter The Tramp (1922).

From 1922 to 1924, she studied at the prestigious Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm. While she was there, she met the Swedish director Mauritz Stiller. He trained her in cinema acting technique and cast her in a major role in Gösta Berlings Saga (1924) (English: The Story of Gösta Berling) opposite Swedish film actor Lars Hanson. He also gave her the stage name Greta Garbo. She starred in two movies in Sweden and one in Germany.

When Stiller went to the United States in 1925 to work for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, he insisted that Garbo be given a contract as well. But their relationship came to an end as her fame grew. He was fired by MGM and returned to Sweden in 1928, where he died soon after.

Life in Hollywood

The most important of Garbo's silent movies were The Torrent (1926), Flesh and the Devil (1927) and Love (1927). She starred in the latter two with the popular leading man John Gilbert. Her name was linked with his in a much publicized romance, and she was said to have left him standing at the altar when she changed her mind about getting married. The actress reportedly had several lesbian lovers, including the actress Louise Brooks and the writer/socialite Mercedes de Acosta. She also had an on-and-off affair with the primarily homosexual British photographer Cecil Beaton, to whom she was briefly engaged.

Having achieved enormous success as a silent movie star, she was one of the few who made the transition to talkies. Her low, husky voice with Swedish accent was heard on screen for the first time in Eugene O'Neill's Anna Christie (1930), which was publicized with the slogan "Garbo Talks." The movie was a huge success, but Garbo personally hated her performance.

Unfortunately, her one-time fiancé, John Gilbert, whose popularity was waning, did not fare as well after the advent of sound due to the high pitch and thinness of his voice, and his career faltered.

When she was filmed, if something happened that she was not pleased with she would say, "I think I'll go back to Sweden!" This would frighten the movie studio heads, who gave in to her every wish. She was known for always having a closed set to all visitors. No one could watch as her scenes were shot. Garbo appeared very seductive as the World War I spy in the title role of Mata Hari (1932). The censors complained about her revealing outfit shown on the movie poster. She was next part of an all star cast in Grand Hotel (1932).

She then had a contract dispute with MGM and did not appear on the screen for almost two years. They finally settled and she signed a new contract, which granted her almost total control over her movies. She exercised that control by getting her leading man on Queen Christina (1934), Laurence Olivier, replaced with Gilbert. David O. Selznick wanted her cast as the dying heiress in Dark Victory in 1935, but she insisted on being cast instead in another screen version of Tolstoy's classic Anna Karenina. She had made a silent version, Love, with John Gilbert in (1927).

Her performance as the doomed courtesan in Camille (1936) was called the finest ever recorded on film. She then starred opposite Melvyn Douglas in the comedy Ninotchka (1939) directed by Ernst Lubitsch.

Garbo was nominated for the Academy Award for Academy Award for Best Actress for Anna Christie (1930), Romance (1930 movie) (1930)), Camille (1937) and Ninotchka (1939).

Greta Garbo was considered one of the most glamorous movie stars of the 1920s and 1930s. She was also famous for shunning publicity, which became part of the Garbo mystique. Her famous byline was always said to be: "I want to be alone," spoken with a heavy accent which made the word 'want' sound like 'vont'. However Garbo commented later, "I never said, 'I want to be alone.' I only said, 'I want to be left alone.' There is all the difference." Except at the very beginning of her career, she granted no interviews, signed no autographs, attended no premieres and answered no fan mail. According to private letters released in Sweden in 2005 to mark the centenary of her birth, she was reclusive in part because she was self-obsessed, depressive, and ashamed of her latrine-cleaner father. They also show that Garbo remained single in the United States because of an unrequited love for her drama school sweetheart, the Swedish actress Mimi Pollak .

Ninotchka was a successful attempt at lightening Garbo's image and making her less exotic, complete with the insertion of a scene in which her character breaks into joyful laughter which subsequently provided the film with its famous tagline, "Garbo laughs!"

A follow-up film, Two-Faced Woman (1941), attempted to capitalize by casting Garbo in a romantic comedy, where she would play a double role that also featured her dancing. The film, directed by George Cukor, was a failure. It was Garbo's last screen appearance.

It is often reported that Garbo chose to retire from cinema after this film's failure, but already by 1935 she was becoming more choosy about her roles, and eventually years passed without her agreeing to do another film. By her own admission, Garbo felt that after World War II the world changed, perhaps forever.

In 1949, Garbo filmed a screen test as she considered reentering the movie business, but otherwise never stepped in front of a movie camera again. There were suggestions that she might appear as the "Duchess de Guermantes" in a film adaptation of Marcel Proust's "In Search of Lost Time" (in those days the novel was still generally known as "Remembrance of Things Past" in the English-speaking world) but this never came to fruition. She withdrew from the entertainment world completely and moved to a secluded life in New York City, refusing to make any public appearances. Up until her death, Garbo sightings were considered sport for paparazzi photographers.

Secluded retirement

Garbo felt her movies had their proper place in history and would gain in value. On February 9, 1951, she became a naturalized citizen of the United States. In 1954 she was awarded a special Academy Award for her unforgettable performances. In the mid-1950s, she bought a seven room apartment in New York at 450 East 52nd Street, where she lived for the rest of her life.

She would at times jet-set with some of the world's best known personalities such as Aristotle Onassis, but chose to live a private life. She spent time gardening flowers and vegetables and was known for taking walks through New York streets dressed casually and wearing large sunglasses, always avoiding prying eyes, the paparazzi and media attention.

Garbo lived the last years of her life in absolute seclusion. She had invested very wisely, was known for extreme frugality, and was a very wealthy woman. It is rumored that she wrote an autobiography just before her death but this book has yet to be published if it exists.

She died at age 84 as a result of renal failure in New York and was cremated. She had previously been operated and treated for breast cancer, which she apparently overcame. She left her estate to her niece. Her ashes are buried at the Skogskyrkogården Cemetery in Stockholm, Sweden.

Greta Garbo has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6901 Hollywood Boulevard in Hollywood.

Garbo's legacy

In September 2005, as part of a series of stamps issued to commemorate movie stars, the U.S. Postal Service released a stamp showing Garbo, honoring her enduring status as a film icon.

Although most of Garbo's films were released to home video in the VHS format, DVD release of her work, both in North America and elsewhere, has been slow in coming with only a few releases prior to 2005: Grand Hotel, the public domain Joyless Street, a Russian release of Conquest, and a special Turner Classic Movies collection entitled Garbo Silents featuring Mysterious Lady, The Temptress, Devil in the Flesh and a few minutes of the lost Divine Woman. In September 2005, Warner Brothers, now distributor of the MGM catalogue, simultaneously released Ninotchka, Camille, Queen Christina, Mata Hari, Anna Christie, and Anna Karenina in digitally restored editions.

Filmography

• Mr. and Mrs. Stockholm (1920) (short subject)
• How Not to Dress (1921) (short subject)
• A Happy Knight (1921)
• Peter the Tramp (1922)
• The Saga of Gosta Berling (1924)
• The Joyless Street (1925)
• The Torrent (1926)
• The Temptress (1926)
• Flesh and the Devil (1926)
• Love (1927)
• The Divine Woman (1928)
• The Mysterious Lady (1928)
• A Woman of Affairs (1928)
• Wild Orchids (1929)
• A Man's Man (1929) (Cameo)
• The Single Standard (1929)
• The Kiss (1929)
• Anna Christie (1930)
• Romance (1930)
• Inspiration (1931)
• Love Business (1931) (short subject) (appears in gag photo)
• Anna Christie (1931) (German version)
• Susan Lenox (Her Fall and Rise) (1931)
• Mata Hari (1931)
• Grand Hotel (1932)
• As You Desire Me (1932)
• Queen Christina (1933)
• The Painted Veil (1934)
• Anna Karenina (1935)
• Camille (1936)
• Conquest (1937)
• Ninotchka (1939)
• Two-Faced Woman (1941)

This content from Wikipedia is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article Greta Garbo