Born Greta Lovisa Gustafsson[3] in Stockholm, Sweden, the youngest of three children born to Karl Alfred Gustafsson (1871–1920) and Anna Lovisa Johansson (1872–1944). 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 the department store PUB in Stockholm, where she would also model for newspaper advertisements. Her first motion picture aspirations came when she appeared in a group of advertising short films for the department store where she worked, eventually seen by comedy director Eric Petscher.
He cast her in a bit part for his upcoming film Peter The Tramp (1922) (although her major motion picture debut was a year earlier in a low-budget film).
From 1922 to 1924, she studied at the prestigious Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm. While she was there, she met director Mauritz Stiller. He trained her in cinema acting technique, gave her the stage name Greta Garbo, and cast her in a major role in the silent film Gösta Berlings Saga (1924) (English: The Story of Gösta Berling), a dramatization of the famous novel by Nobel laureate Selma Lagerlöf. She starred opposite Swedish film actor Lars Hanson.
She starred in two movies in Sweden and one in Germany (Die Freudlose Gasse -- The Joyless Street).
She and her mentor, Mauritz Stiller, were brought to MGM by Louis B. Mayer on the strength of Gösta Berlings Saga. On viewing the film, Mayer was impressed with Stiller's direction, but was much more taken with Garbo's acting and screen presence. According to his daughter, Irene Mayer, with whom he screened the film, it was look and emotions that emanated from her eyes that would make her a star. Unfortunately, her relationship with Stiller came to an end as her fame grew and he struggled in the studio system. He was fired by MGM and returned to Sweden in 1928, where he died soon after.
Throughout this period, Garbo was slowly emerging as a Galatea molded by a series of corporate Pygmalions. In photographs and films one can see her change from a pudgy shopgirl, through various metamorphoses as she enters the studio machinery, until she turns into the perfect Sphinx, the "face" captured in famous pictures by Steichen and Clarence Bull and other photographers of the period.
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 or bisexual lovers, including 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 who writes about his somewhat requited passion for her in his published diaries.
Having achieved enormous success as a silent movie star, she was one of the few who made the transition to talkies. She delayed as long as possible, and the studio worried endlessly about whether the world was ready for a talking Swedish Sphinx. Her film The Kiss (1929) was the last film MGM made without dialog (it used a soundtrack with music and sound-effects only), and marked the end of an era.
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. His last appearance with Garbo, in Queen Christina, was not as bad as some critics have suggested: he suffered from the problem all of Garbo's leading men suffered, which was that she was inevitably stronger and more powerful than they were.
Gilbert, John Barrymore, Fredric March, Robert Taylor and others ended up like feeble drones worshipping before the queen bee. Clark Gable was more than a match for Garbo, but she made only one early film with him, Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise. This may have been because the two greatly disliked each other - Greta thought Gable was a wooden actor while Gable in turn thought Greta was a snob.
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, and was famous for having various MGM executives and actors ejected from sets. 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 (1931). 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), which won the Best Picture Oscar and featured Garbo as a Russian ballerina melodramatically delivering the line "I want to be alone". Her co-star was John Barrymore, among the other all-stars, including his elder brother, Lionel Barrymore.
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 previous silent version Love with John Gilbert in 1927). While Anna Karenina has its moments, it also has the "glorious airless fishbowl" quality of many MGM epics of the period.
Her performance as the doomed courtesan in Camille (1936), directed by George Cukor, was called the finest ever recorded on film; her death scene with Robert Taylor was particularly memorable. She subsequently starred opposite Melvyn Douglas in the comedy Ninotchka (1939), directed by Ernst Lubitsch, which she herself seemed to enjoy making, and was one of her favourites.
Garbo was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress for Anna Christie (1930), Romance (1930), Camille (1937) and Ninotchka (1939).
Many of her fellow Hollywood actors and actresses were in awe of Garbo's talent.
"Her instinct, her mastery over the machine, was pure witchcraft. I cannot analyse this woman's acting. I only know that no one else so effectively worked in front of a camera." —Bette Davis
Personal life
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. Except at the very beginning of her career, she granted no interviews, signed no autographs, attended no premieres and answered no fan mail.
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. This quote as noted comes from her role in Grand Hotel, 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."
In recent years it has been revealed through countless sources about how common homosexuality and lesbianism were in the early years of Hollywood. Many stars of the silver screen were known to prefer the same sex, but the powerful studios almost always invented a life that would cover the "darker" side of the star's lives from the general public.
Garbo kept her private affairs out of the limelight. 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." [4]
Some also suggest that Garbo remained single in the United States because of an unrequited love for her drama school sweetheart, the Swedish actress Mimi Pollak (see [5]). Garbo's personal letters recently released to the public indicate that she remained in love with Pollak for the rest of her life. When Pollak announced she was pregnant, Garbo wrote: "We cannot help our nature, as God has created it. But I have always thought you and I belonged together."
"Garbo's biographer Barry Paris notes that she was technically bisexual, predominantly lesbian, and increasingly asexual as the years went by", and it has been indicated that Garbo struggled greatly with her sexuality, only becoming involved with other women in affairs that she could control. (as per [6]).
Her most famous heterosexual relationship was with actor John Gilbert. They starred together for the first time in the classic Flesh and the Devil (1927). Their on-screen "erotic intensity" (see [7]) soon translated into an off-camera romance and by the end of production Garbo had moved in with Gilbert (see[8]) Gilbert is said to have proposed to Garbo at least three times (see [9]) though when a marriage was finally arranged in 1927, she failed to show up at the ceremony (see [10]).
She was also linked romantically with actresses Marlene Dietrich, Eva Le Gallienne, Claudette Colbert, Joan Crawford, Louise Brooks, Ona Munson, with writer Salka Viertel, and had a long term and unstable affair with writer/poet Mercedes de Acosta from 1931 to 1944, which ended badly. [11] De Acosta reportedly loved her for the remainder of her life, although Garbo did not return that love.
Later career
Ninotchka was a successful attempt at lightening Garbo's image and making her less exotic, complete with the insertion of a scene in a restaurant 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, and tried to make her into "an ordinary girl". 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 1941, MGM costume-designer Adrian also left the studio, later saying:
"It was because of Garbo that I left M-G-M. In her last picture they wanted to make her a sweater girl, a real American type. I said, 'When the glamour ends for Garbo, it also ends for me. She has created a type. If you destroy that illusion, you destroy her.' When Garbo walked out of the studio, glamour went with her, and so did I."
In 1949, Garbo filmed several screen tests as she considered reentering the movie business to shoot "La Duchess de Langeais" directed by Walter Wanger, but otherwise never stepped in front of a movie camera again. The plans for this film collapsed when financing failed to materialize, and these tests were lost for 40 years, then resurfaced in someone's garage[12]. They were included in the 2005 TCM documentary Garbo [13] [14], and show her still radiant at age 43[15]. 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 but this never came to fruition. She was offered many roles over the years, but always turned them down.
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.
Despite these attempts to flee from fame, she was nevertheless voted Best Silent Actress of the Century (her compatriot Ingrid Bergman winning the Best Sound Actress) in 1950, and was also designated as the most beautiful woman ever lived by the Guiness Book of World Records.
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 1953, she bought a seven room apartment in New York City at 450 East 52nd Street, where she lived for the rest of her life. She reportedly never got over the unfinished affair she had with actress Mimi Pollak in her youth, and in later life became bitter over it.
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 was known for taking long 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 even exists.
She died in Nyew York, April 15, 1990 aged 84 as a result of end stage renal disease (ESRD) and pneumonia and was cremated. She had previously been operated and treated for breast cancer, which she apparently overcame.
She left her entire estate to her niece, Gray Reisfeld (Mrs. Donald Reisfeld), and nothing to the elderly female companion with whom she lived for many years, Claire.
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.
