Greta Garbo

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Greta Garbo
Mata Hari.jpg
Garbo in Mata Hari (1931)
Background information
Born as: Greta Lovisa Gustafsson
Born Sep 18, 1905
Stockholm, Sweden
Died Apr 15, 1990 - age  85
New York City, U.S.
 
Buried: Skogskyrkogården Cemetery, Stockholm, Sweden
Occupation: Actress
Website: gretagarbo.com
Citizenship: Sweden (1905–1951)
United States (1951–1990)

Greta Garbo (born Greta Lovisa Gustafsson; ✦18 September 1905 – 15 April 1990) was a Swedish-American actress. Regarded as one of the greatest actresses to ever be on screen, she was known for her melancholic, somber persona, her many film portrayals of tragic characters, and her subtle and understated performances. In 1999, the American Film Institute ranked Garbo fifth on its list of the greatest female stars of classic Hollywood cinema.

Garbo launched her career with a secondary role in the 1924 Swedish film The Saga of Gösta Berling. Her performance caught the attention of Louis B. Mayer, chief executive of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, who brought her to Hollywood in 1925. She stirred interest with her first American silent film, Torrent (1926). Garbo's performance in Flesh and the Devil (1927), her third movie, made her an international star. In 1928, Garbo starred in A Woman of Affairs, which catapulted her at MGM to its highest box-office star, usurping the long-reigning Lillian Gish. Other well-known Garbo films from the silent era are The Mysterious Lady (1928), The Single Standard (1929) and The Kiss (1929).

With Garbo's first sound film, Anna Christie (1930), MGM marketers enticed the public with the tagline "Garbo talks!" That same year she starred in Romance and for her performances in both films she received the first of three nominations for the Academy Award for Best Actress. By 1932 her success allowed her to dictate the terms of her contracts and she became increasingly selective about her roles. She continued in films such as Mata Hari (1931), Susan Lenox (Her Fall and Rise) (1931), Grand Hotel (1932), Queen Christina (1933) and Anna Karenina (1935).

Many critics and film historians consider her performance as the doomed courtesan Marguerite Gautier in Camille (1936) to be her finest and the role gained her a second Academy Award nomination. However, Garbo's career soon declined and she became one of many stars labeled box office poison in 1938. Her career revived with a turn to comedy in Ninotchka (1939) which earned her a third Academy Award nomination. But after the failure of Two-Faced Woman (1941), she retired from the screen at the age of 35 after acting in 28 films. In 1954, Garbo was awarded an Academy Honorary Award "for her luminous and unforgettable screen performances".

After retiring, Garbo declined all opportunities to return to the screen and, shunning publicity, led a private life. She became an art collector whose collection, though containing many works of negligible value, included works from Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Pierre Bonnard and Kees van Dongen, which were worth millions of dollars when she died.

I want to be alone

– Greta Garbo

In retirement, Garbo generally led a private life of simplicity and leisure. She made no public appearances and assiduously avoided the publicity she loathed. As she had been during her Hollywood years, Garbo, with her innate need for solitude, was often reclusive. Contrary to myth, from the beginning, she had many friends and acquaintances with whom she socialized and later traveled. Occasionally, she jet-setted with well-known and wealthy personalities, striving to guard her privacy just as she had during her career.

She was often flummoxed about what to do and how to spend her time ("drifting" was the word she frequently used), always struggling with her many eccentricities, and her life-long melancholy and moodiness. As she approached her sixtieth birthday, she told a frequent walking companion: "In a few days, it will be the anniversary of the sorrow that never leaves me, that will never leave me for the rest of my life." To another friend, she said, in 1971, "I suppose I suffer from very deep depression." One biographer claims that she arguably could have been bipolar. "I am very happy one moment, the next there is nothing left for me", she said in 1933.

Beginning in the 1940s, she became an art collector. Many of the paintings which she purchased were of negligible value, but she did buy paintings by Renoir, Rouault, Kandinsky, Bonnard and Jawlensky. Her art collection was worth millions when she died in 1990.

On 9 February 1951, she became a naturalized citizen of the United States, and in 1953, she bought a seven-room apartment at 450 East 52nd Street in Manhattan, New York City, where she lived for the rest of her life.

On 13 November 1963, just nine days before the assassination of President Kennedy, Garbo was a dinner guest at the White House. She spent the night at the Washington, D. C., home of philanthropist Florence Mahoney. Garbo's niece reported that Garbo had always spoken of it as a "magical evening."

Italian film director Luchino Visconti allegedly attempted to bring Garbo back to the screen in 1969 with a small part, Maria Sophia, Queen of Naples, in his adaptation of Proust's Remembrance of Things Past. He exclaimed: "I am very pleased with the idea that this woman, with her severe and authoritarian presence, should figure in the decadent and rarefied climate of the world described by Proust." Claims that Garbo was interested in the part cannot be substantiated.

In 1971, Garbo vacationed with her close friend Baroness Cécile de Rothschild at her summer home in Southern France. De Rothschild introduced her to Samuel Adams Green, an art collector and curator in New York City. Green, who became an important friend and walking companion, was in the habit of tape-recording all of his telephone calls and, with Garbo's permission, recorded many of his conversations with her. In 1985, Garbo ended the friendship when she was falsely informed that Green had played the tapes to friends. In his last will and testament, Green bequeathed all of the tapes to the film archives at Wesleyan University in 2011. The tapes reveal Garbo's personality in later life, her sense of humor, and various eccentricities.

Although she became increasingly withdrawn in her final years, over time, she became close to her cook and housekeeper, Claire Koger, who worked for her for 31 years. "We were very close—like sisters," the reticent Koger said.

Throughout her life, Garbo was known for taking long, daily walks with companions, or taking them 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.

Relationships

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 develop acting skills on the set and teaching her how to behave like a star, socialize at parties, and deal with studio bosses. They co-starred 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." In later years, Garbo said of Gilbert, "I can't remember what I ever saw in him."

In 1937, Garbo met orchestra conductor Leopold Stokowski, with whom she had a highly publicized relationship while the pair traveled throughout Europe the following year; whether the relationship was platonic or romantic is uncertain. In his diary, Erich Maria Remarque discusses a liaison with Garbo in 1941, and in his memoir, Cecil Beaton described an affair with her in 1947 and 1948. In 1941, she met the Russian-born millionaire, George Schlee, who was introduced to her by his wife, fashion designer Valentina. Nicholas Turner, Garbo's close friend for 33 years, said that, after she bought an apartment in the same building, "Garbo moved in and took Schlee from Valentina right away.” Schlee would divide his time between the two, becoming Garbo's close companion and advisor until his death in 1964.

Recent biographers and others have speculated that because it can be assumed she had intimate relationships with women as well as men, Garbo was bisexual, even "predominantly lesbian.” In 1927, Garbo was introduced to stage and screen actress Lilyan Tashman, and they may have had an affair, according to some writers Silent film star Louise Brooks stated that she and Garbo had a brief liaison the following year.

In 1931, Garbo befriended the writer and acknowledged lesbian Mercedes de Acosta, whom she met through Salka Viertel, and, according to Garbo's and de Acosta's biographers, began a sporadic and volatile romance. The two remained friends—with ups and downs—for almost 30 years, during which time Garbo wrote de Acosta 181 letters, cards, and telegrams, now at the Rosenbach Museum & Library in Philadelphia. Garbo's family, which controls her estate, has made only 87 of these items publicly available.

In 2005, Mimi Pollak's estate released 60 letters Garbo had written to her in their long correspondence. Several letters suggest she may have had romantic feelings for Pollak for many years. After learning of Pollak's pregnancy in 1930, for example, Garbo wrote: "We cannot help our nature, as God has created it. But I have always thought you and I belonged together.” In 1975, she wrote a poem about not being able to touch the hand of her friend with whom she might have been walking through life.

Death

Garbo was successfully treated for breast cancer in 1984. Towards the end of her life, only Garbo's closest friends knew she was receiving six-hour dialysis treatments three times a week at The Rogosin Institute in New York Hospital. A photograph appeared in the media in early 1990, showing Koger assisting Garbo, who was walking with a cane, into the hospital.

Garbo died on 15 April 1990, aged 84, in the hospital, as a result of pneumonia and renal failure. Daum later claimed that towards the end, she also suffered from gastrointestinal and periodontal ailments.

Garbo was cremated in Manhattan, and her ashes were interred in 1999 at Skogskyrkogården Cemetery just south of her native Stockholm.

Garbo had invested wisely, primarily in stocks and bonds, and left her entire estate of $32 million (equivalent to $66,000,000 in 2021) to her niece.

Legacy

Garbo was an international star during the late silent era and the "Golden Age" of Hollywood who became a screen icon. For most of her career, she was the highest-paid actor or actress at MGM, making her for many years its "premier prestige star.” The April 1990 Washington Post obituary said that "at the peak of her popularity, she was a virtual cult figure."

Garbo possessed a subtlety and naturalism in her acting that set her apart from other actors and actresses of the period. About her work in silents, film critic Ty Burr said: "This was a new kind of actor—not the stage actor who had to play to the far seats, but someone who could just look and with her eyes literally goes from rage to sorrow in just a close-up."

Film historian Jeffrey Vance said that Garbo communicated her characters' innermost feelings through her movement, gestures, and, most importantly, her eyes. With the slightest movement of them, he argues, she subtly conveyed complex attitudes and feelings toward other characters and the truth of the situation. "She doesn't act," said Camille co-star Rex O'Malley, "she lives her roles." Director Clarence Brown, who made seven of Garbo's pictures, told an interviewer, "Garbo has something behind the eyes that you couldn't see until you photographed it in close-up. You could see thought. If she had to look at one person with jealousy, and another with love, she didn't have to change her expression. You could see it in her eyes as she looked from one to the other. And nobody else has been able to do that on screen." Director George Sidney adds: "You could call it underplaying, but in underplaying, she overplayed everyone else."

Many critics have said that few of Garbo's 24 Hollywood films are artistically exceptional and that many are simply bad. It has been said, however, that her commanding and magnetic performances usually overcome the weaknesses of plot and dialogue. As one biographer put it, "All moviegoers demanded of a Garbo production was Greta Garbo."

She was portrayed by Betty Comden in the film Garbo Talks (1984). The film concerns a dying Garbo fan (Anne Bancroft) whose last wish is to meet her idol. Her son (played by Ron Silver) sets about trying to get Garbo to visit his mother at the hospital.

Film historian Ephraim Katz: "Of all the stars who have ever fired the imaginations of audiences, none has quite projected a magnetism and a mystique equal to Garbo. ‘The Divine,’ the ‘dream princess of eternity,’ the ‘Sarah Bernhardt of films,’ are only a few of the superlatives writers used in describing her over the years ... She played heroines that were at once sensual and pure, superficial and profound, suffering and hopeful, world-weary and life-inspiring."

American film actress Bette Davis: "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."

American and Mexican film actress Dolores del Río: "The most extraordinary woman (in art) that I have encountered in my life. It was as if she had diamonds in her bones and in her interior light struggled to come out through the pores of her skin."

American film director George Cukor: "She had a talent that few actresses or actors possess. In close-ups, she gave the impression, of the illusion of great movement. She would move her head just a little bit, and the whole screen would come alive, like a strong breeze that made itself felt."

American film actor Gregory Peck: "If you ask me, my favorite actress of all time, I will tell you that it is Greta Garbo. She shared her emotions with the camera and the audience. They were very truthful emotions. To my mind, she was an early practitioner of the Method. She felt everything she did and had the intelligence to go with it. . . . And that is the key for the audience. If they believe it, then they’ve spent a couple of good hours at the cinema."

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