Greta Garbo, original name Greta Lovisa Gustafsson, was one of the most glamorous and popular motion-picture stars of the 1920s and ’30s, who is best known for her portrayals of strong-willed heroines, most of them as compellingly enigmatic as Garbo herself.
Background
Greta Lovisa Gustafsson was born on September 18, 1905, in Södermalm, Stockholm, Sweden. She was the third and youngest child of Anna Lovisa (née Karlsson, 1872–1944), a housewife who later worked at a jam factory, and Karl Alfred Gustafsson (1871–1920), a laborer. Garbo had an older brother, Sven Alfred (1898–1967), and an older sister, Alva Maria (1903–1926).
Her parents met in Stockholm, where her father had been visiting from Frinnaryd. He moved to Stockholm to become independent and worked in various odd jobs—street cleaner, grocer, factory worker and butcher's assistant. He married Anna, who had recently moved from Högsby. The Gustafssons were impoverished and lived in a three-bedroom cold-water flat at Blekingegatan No. 32. They brought up their three children in a working class district regarded as the city's slum.
In the winter of 1919, the Spanish flu spread throughout Stockholm, and Garbo's father, to whom she was very close, became ill. He began missing work and eventually lost his job. Garbo stayed at home looking after him and taking him to the hospital for weekly treatments. He died in 1920 when she was 14 years old.
Education
Garbo was a shy daydreamer as a child. She hated school and preferred to play alone. Yet she was an imaginative child and a natural leader who became interested in theatre at an early age. She directed her friends in make-believe games and performances and dreamed of becoming an actress. Later, she would participate in amateur theatre with her friends and frequent the Mosebacke Theatre. At the age of 13, Garbo graduated from school, and, typical of a Swedish working class girl at that time, she did not attend high school. She later acknowledged a resulting inferiority complex.
In 1923 Greta Garbo was one of only seven students admitted to Sweden's prestigious Royal Dramatic Theatre Academy. While attending the training school, she chose her stage name and worked to develop her voice. Her studies at the academy served as both the foundation for her acting career and a source of several lifelong friendships with other actors and artists.
Garbo first worked as a soap-lather girl in a barber's shop but eventually, on the advice of her friends, applied for, and accepted, a position in the PUB department store, running errands and working in the millinery department. Before long, she began modeling hats for the store's catalogues, which led to a more lucrative job as a fashion model.
Within a year, one of Sweden's foremost film directors, Mauritz Stiller, recognized Garbo's unique beauty and immense talent. Stiller selected Garbo to play the role of Countess Elizabeth Dohna in the Swedish film The Atonement of Gosta Berling (1924). The film was considered a silent screen masterpiece and was a huge success throughout Europe. Garbo was soon cast in the leading role of Joyless Street, the definitive masterpiece of German realistic cinema, directed by G.W. Pabst. The film received international acclaim for its depth of feeling and technical innovations. The film and Garbo's performance were a critical success, shattering box office records.
Driving her unmercifully, Stiller molded her into an actress and insisted on bringing her with him to the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) studio in Hollywood in the summer of 1925. Through Stiller, she won an assignment in her first American film The Torrent (1926). Garbo quickly became the reigning star of Hollywood, due to both the box office success of her films and her captivating performances. She starred in eleven silent films. Her dramatic presence on the screen redefined acting. Garbo's aura created a unique balance between femininity and independence, proving that these qualities were not mutually exclusive. While many of her silent film contemporaries failed in making the transition to sound films, Garbo found artistic expression and thrived in this breakthrough medium. Her voice added a wonderful new dimension to her characters. She then starred in The Temptress (1926) and Flesh and the Devil (1927).
Garbo's first sound picture was Anna Christie (1930), based on a play by American dramatist Eugene O'Neill. The sound scene was a tour de force, the longest, continuous sound take of the time. Because of the film's extraordinary success, MGM created a German language version with Garbo and an entirely new cast. Garbo's ability to act successfully in two languages demonstrates her remarkable range and linguistic talent.
Garbo's career continued to flourish. She starred in 15 sound films including such classics as Mata Hari (1932), As You Desire Me (1932), and Queen Christina (1933), one of her first classic roles. Director Rouben Mamoulian used Garbo's mask-like visage as a canvas upon which the audience ascribed an array of intense emotions. This use of her face as an expressive conduit became Garbo's signature style, and she created magic with it in her starring roles in Susan Lennox—Her Fall and Rise (1931 with Clark Gable), Grand Hotel (1932), Anna Karenina (1935), Camille (1936), Conquest (1937), and Ninotchka (1939).
Garbo gradually withdrew into an isolated retirement in 1941 after the failure of Two-Faced Woman, a domestic comedy. Her retirement was also partly because of World War II. She was tempted by a number of very interesting acting possibilities, but, unfortunately, none of the projects came to fruition.
Her twenty years of brilliant film portrayals created a cinematic legend characterized by financial success. During the mid-1930's she was America's highest paid female. She became a U.S. citizen in 1951, and in 1954 she received (in absentia) a special Academy Award for "her unforgettable screen performances." Garbo moved to New York city in 1953 and traveled extensively.
She died at her home in New York on April 15, 1990.
Garbo was a Lutheran (a member of her country's Protestant state church, the Church of Sweden), as were most Swedes of her time. She attended church regularly when she was young. From an early age, Garbo was obsessed with becoming an actress. From the time of her mid-teens, Garbo was not active in any denomination, although she expressed strong belief in God. At times during her career in Hollywood she was deeply into the occult.
Views
Quotations:
"I never said, 'I want to be alone.' I only said, 'I want to be left alone.' There is all the difference."
"Anyone who has a continuous smile on his face conceals a toughness that is almost frightening."
"Life would be so wonderful if we only knew what to do with it."
"There are some who want to get married and others who don't. I have never had an impulse to go to the altar. I am a difficult person to lead.
Being a movie star, and this applies to all of them, means being looked at from every possible direction. You are never left at peace, you're just fair game."
"Your joys and sorrows. You can never tell them. You cheapen the inside of yourself if you do tell them."
"It is bitter to think of one's best years disappearing in this unpolished country."
Personality
Greta Garbo was a woman of remarkable beauty, intelligence, and independent spirit. Despite her beauty, Garbo was somewhat reclusive and photophobic.
She was not just beauty but matched it with her intelligence and love for independence. Greta Garbo battled depression for the majority of her life. She was often referred to as moody or temperamental.
Garbo’s diet as strange and horrifying. Garbo followed celebrity nutritionist Gayelord Hauser’s dietary advice, which meant that she consumed foods such as vegetables, wheat germ, yogurt, yeast, molasses, and buttermilk. One of Hauser’s recipes is celery loaf, a vegetarian meatloaf made with pureed celery, chopped nuts, and milk. According to Garbo’s friends, her diet was more flexible than Hauser’s, and she sometimes ate foods such as tuna sandwiches, Triscuits, and cheese.
For decades, film scholars and biographers have speculated about Garbo’s sexuality. Although she never married, Garbo purportedly had relationships with both men and women, including her frequent costar John Gilbert, whom she allegedly left at the altar.
From the early days of her career, Garbo avoided industry social functions, preferring to spend her time alone or with friends. She never signed autographs or answered fan mail, and rarely gave interviews. Nor did she ever appear at Oscar ceremonies, even when she was nominated. Her aversion to publicity and the press was undeniably genuine, and exasperating to the studio at first. In an interview in 1928, she explained that her desire for privacy began when she was a child, stating "as early as I can remember, I have wanted to be alone. I detest crowds, don't like many people."
Throughout her life, Garbo was known for taking long, daily walks with companions or by herself. In retirement, she walked the streets of New York City dressed casually and wearing large sunglasses. "Garbo-watching" became a sport for photographers, the media, admirers, and curious New Yorkers, but she maintained her elusive mystique to the end.
Physical Characteristics:
Greta Garbo was diagnosed with breast cancer and was successfully treated for the disease in 1984.
Quotes from others about the person
"Every man's harmless fantasy mistress. By being worshiped by the entire world she gave you the feeling that if your imagination had to sin, it can at least congratulate itself on its impeccable taste." - Alistair Cooke
"Her instinct, her mastery over the machine, was pure witchcraft. I cannot analyze this woman's acting. I only know that no one else so effectively worked in front of a camera." - Bette Davis.
"She is the most miraculous blend of personality and sheer dramatic talent that the screen has ever known and her presence in The Painted Veil immediately makes it one of the season's cinema events." - Andre Sennwald.
"You're the purple light of a summer night in Spain. You're the National Gallery; you're Garbo's Salary; you're cellophane!" - Cole Porter.
"Garbo is lonely. She always has been and she always will be. She lives in the core of a vast aching aloneness. She is a great artist, but it is both her supreme glory and her supreme tragedy that art is to her the only reality. The figures of living men and women, the events of everyday existence, move about her, shadowy, unsubstantial. It is only when she breathes the breath of life into a part, clothes with her own flesh and blood the concept of a playwright, that she herself is fully awake, fully alive." - Marie Dressler.
"What, when drunk, one sees in other women, one sees in Garbo sober." -
Kenneth Tynan.
"Except physically, we know little more about Garbo than we know about Shakespeare." - Kenneth Tynan.
"The mystery surrounding Garbo was as thick as a London fog." - Tallulah Bankhead.
Interests
Garbo's retirement from films did not mark the end of a very busy, independent life. Without the pressures of film-making, Garbo had the opportunity to turn to other creative pursuits such as painting, poetry, creative design of clothing and furnishings, gardening, and a rigorous daily exercise routine.
She owned one of rin tin tin' puppies. Rin Tin Tin, the famous German Shepherd, was a huge film star in the 1920s. He sired at least 48 puppies during his lifetime, and Garbo (like other celebrities such as Jean Harlow) was gifted a pup.
Speaking about her taste in television, Garbo reportedly said, "I watch the dreck." According to her friends, Garbo loved watching cartoons such as The Flintstones, but her favorite show might have been Hollywood Squares, the trivia game show featuring celebrities. Her friends said that she regularly watched the show and loved Paul Lynde, who was frequently featured in the center square position.
Artists
After retiring from acting, Garbo collected paintings and 18th-century French furniture. In the 1950s and '60s, she visited art galleries and exhibitions looking for pieces to buy. According to David Nash of Sotheby's, the living room of Garbo's Manhattan apartment featured three Renoir paintings and a Savonnerie rug. She also owned a Louis XV chair and banquette. After her death, her paintings and furniture (which were worth millions of dollars) were auctioned at Sotheby's.
Connections
Garbo never married, had no children, and lived alone as an adult. Her most famous romance was with her frequent co-star, John Gilbert, with whom she lived intermittently in 1926 and 1927. Soon after their romance began, Gilbert began helping her acting on the set, teaching her how to behave like a star, how to socialize at parties, and how to deal with studio bosses. They costarred again in three more hits, Love (1927), A Woman of Affairs (1928), and Queen Christina (1933). Gilbert allegedly proposed to her numerous times, with Garbo agreeing but backing out at the last minute. "I was in love with him," she said. "But I froze. I was afraid he would tell me what to do and boss me. I always wanted to be the boss."
Greta Garbo was romantically linked with many of her co-stars and with at least one woman. She remained unmarried. She had a platonic relationship with the English photographer Cecil Beaton and ventriloquist Edgar Bergen.
After her death many letters were discovered that had been written by her and seemed to suggest that she may have been a lesbian.