Greta Garbo

Greta Garbo (b. 1905–d. 1990) is arguably the most famous female movie star Hollywood produced during the late silent film era and the beginning of the golden age of the studio system. She exuded an unbridled sexuality and sophistication new for the era that immediately set her apart from her on-screen contemporaries like Lillian Gish, Mary Pickford, and Janet Gaynor. Born Greta Lovisa Gustafsson in 1905 in a working-class district of Stockholm, Sweden, Garbo began life as the youngest of three children. Money and excitement were lacking for all. Biographies of Garbo often reference her love of daydreaming and play-acting to escape her dreary life, directing her friends in make-believe playground dramas as she fantasized about a life as an actress. Her father’s ill health took a toll on the family and Greta was often asked to care for him. His death in 1919, when she was only fourteen, led her to leave school early, something she was not unhappy about doing as she hated school. She worked in a department store and modeled before eventually being “discovered” by her mentor, Mauritz Stiller. Her performance in Stiller’s 1924 Swedish film The Saga of Gosta Berling was well received and got the attention of MGM studio head Louis B. Mayer, who brought her to America in 1925 and made her an international star. Yet her Swedish cultural disposition remained inside her head and heart and she never was comfortable in her adopted homeland in spite of the fame, fortune, and notoriety. In 1941 she shot her last film, Two-Faced Woman. At the age of thirty-five, after appearing in just twenty-eight films, she sensed that things were changing in Hollywood and she walked away from the cameras, eventually relocating to an apartment on New York’s posh Upper East Side. Interest in her never ended, however, and she was the subject of conjecture and fascination until her death in 1990. Ironically, while she sought solitude and privacy, she was in some ways even more popular and mythologized following her retirement from the screen. Photographers stalked her regularly and fans hoped somehow to get a fleeting glimpse on the streets of Manhattan of the woman whose ethereal beauty had been seared into the collective brain of moviegoers worldwide and thus maybe somehow, simply by seeing her, come to understand her finally.