GRETA GARBO ,
INTERNATIONAL SUPER STAR OF SILENT FILMS
SERVED AS SPY IN WWII- FREED DANISH JEWS
BORN 1905 SEPTEMBER 18
Greta Garbo (born Greta Lovisa Gustafsson; Swedish: [ˈɡreːˈta lʊˈviːˈsa ˈɡɵstafˈsɔn]; 18 September 1905 – 15 April 1990), was a Swedish-born American film actress and an international star and icon during the 1920s and 1930s. Garbo was nominated three times for the Academy Award for Best Actress and received an honorary one in 1954 for her "luminous and unforgettable screen performances." In 1999, the American Film Institute ranked Garbo fifth on their list of the greatest female stars of Classic Hollywood Cinema, after Katharine Hepburn, Bette Davis, Audrey Hepburn, and Ingrid Bergman.
Garbo launched her career with a secondary role in the 1924 Swedish film The Saga of Gosta Berling. Her performance caught the attention of Louis B. Mayer, chief executive of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), who brought her to Hollywood in 1925. She immediately stirred interest with her first silent film, Torrent, released in 1926; a year later, her performance in Flesh and the Devil, her third movie, made her an international star.[1]
Garbo's first talking film was Anna Christie (1930). MGM marketers enticed the public with the catch-phrase "Garbo talks!" That same year she starred in Romance. For her performances in these films she received the first of three Academy Award nominations for Best Actress. (Academy rules at the time allowed for a performer to receive a single nomination for their work in more than one film.)[2] In 1932, her popularity allowed her to dictate the terms of her contract and she became increasingly selective about her roles. Her success continued in films such as Mata Hari (1931) and Grand Hotel (1932).
Many critics and film historians consider her performance as the doomed courtesan Marguerite Gautier in Camille (1936) to be her finest. The role gained her a second Academy Award nomination. Garbo's career soon declined, however, and she was one of the many stars labeled "Box Office Poison" in 1938. Her career revived upon her 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 twenty-eight films.
From then on, Garbo declined all opportunities to return to the screen. Shunning publicity, she began a private life, and neither married nor had children. Garbo also became an art collector in her later life; her collection, including works from painters such as Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Pierre Bonnard, and Kees van Dongen,[3] was worth millions of dollars when she died.
Childhood and youth[edit]
Monument on the building which now stands where Greta Garbo was born on Södermalm.
Greta Lovisa Gustafsson was born 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.[4][5] Garbo had an older brother, Sven Alfred (1898–1967), and an older sister, Alva Maria (1903–1926).[6]
Monument on the building which now
stands where Greta Garbo was born
Her parents met in Stockholm where her father visited from Frinnaryd. He moved to Stockholm to become independent and worked in various odd jobs—street cleaner, grocer, factory worker and butcher's assistant.[7] He married Anna, who had recently moved from Högsby.[8][9] 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.[10] Garbo would later recall:
Beginnings (1920–1924)[edit]
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.[25] In late 1920, a director of film commercials for the store began casting Garbo in roles advertising women's clothing. Her first commercial premiered on 12 December 1920 and was followed by others the following year.[26] Thus began Garbo's cinematic career. In 1922, Garbo caught the attention of director Erik Arthur Petschler who gave her a part in his short comedy, Peter the Tramp.[27]
Garbo in her first leading role in the Swedish film
From 1922 to 1924, she studied at the Royal Dramatic Theatre's Acting School in Stockholm. She was recruited in 1924 by the prominent Swedish director Mauritz Stiller to play a principal part in his classic film The Saga of Gösta Berling, a dramatization of the famous novel by Nobel Prize winner Selma Lagerlöf.
She played opposite Lars Hanson, a well-known Swedish actor. Stiller became her mentor, training her as a film actress and managing all aspects of her nascent career.[28] She followed her role in Gösta Berling with a starring role in the 1925 German film Die freudlose Gasse (Joyless Street or The Street of Sorrow), directed by G. W. Pabst and co-starring Asta Nielsen.[29]
Silent film stardom (1925–1929)[edit]
In 1925, Garbo, then twenty and unable to speak English, was brought over from Sweden at the request of Mayer. Both Garbo and Stiller arrived in New York in July 1925 after a ten-day trip on the SS Drottningholm.[33] However, they remained in New York for over six months without any word from MGM. They chose to go Los Angeles on their own, but another five weeks passed with no contacts from the studio.[34][35] Now on the verge of returning to Sweden, she wrote to her boyfriend back home: "You're quite right when you think I don't feel at home here. . . Oh you lovely little Sweden, I promise that when I return to you my sad face will smile as never before."[36]
A Swedish friend in Los Angeles decided to help her by contacting MGM producer Irving Thalberg, who agreed to give her a screen test. According to author Frederick Sands, "the result of the test was electrifying. Thalberg was impressed and began grooming the young actress the following day, arranging to fix her teeth, making sure she lost weight, and giving her English lessons."[36]
During her rise to stardom, film historian Mark Vieira notes that "Thalberg decreed that henceforth Garbo would play a young but worldly-wise woman . . . "[37] However, according to Thalberg's actress wife, Norma Shearer, Garbo did not necessarily agree with his ideas:
Miss Garbo at first didn't like playing the exotic, the sophisticated, the woman of the world. She used to complain: "Mr. Thalberg, I am just a young gur-rl!" Irving tossed it off with a laugh. With those elegant pictures he was creating the Garbo image.[37]
Despite her popularity as a silent star,[66] the studio feared that her Swedish accent might impair her work in sound and delayed the shift for as long as possible.[67][68] MGM itself was the last Hollywood studio to convert to sound[69] and her last silent film, The Kiss (1929), was also the studio's.[70] Garbo would go on to become one of the biggest box office draws of the next decade.
Transition to sound and continued success (1930–1939)[edit]
"Garbo talks!" in Anna Christie (1930).
In late 1929, MGM cast Garbo in Anna Christie (1930), a film adaptation of the 1922 play by Eugene O'Neill, her first speaking role.
"Garbo talks!" in Anna Christie(1930).
The screenplay was adapted by Frances Marion and the film was produced by Irving Thalberg and Paul Bern. Sixteen minutes into the film, she famously utters her first line, "Gimme a whiskey, ginger ale on the side, and don't be stingy, baby." The film premiered in New York City on 21 February 1930 publicized with the catchphrase "Garbo talks!", and was the highest-grossing film of the year.[71] Garbo received her first Academy Award for Best Actress nomination for her performance, although she lost to MGM colleague Norma Shearer. Her nomination that year included her performance in Romance (1930). After filming ended,
Garbo—along with a different director and cast—filmed a German-language version of Anna Christie that was released in December 1930.[72] The film's success certified Garbo's successful transition to talkies. In her follow-up film, Romance (1930), she portrayed an Italian opera star opposite Lewis Stone. She was paired opposite Robert Montgomery in Inspiration (1931), and her popularity was used to boost the career of the relatively unknown Clark Gable in Susan Lenox (Her Fall and Rise) (1931). Although the films did not match Garbo's success with her sound debut, she was ranked as the most-popular female star in the United States in 1930 and 1931.
Garbo followed with two of her most famous roles. In 1931, she played the World War I German spy in the lavish production of Mata Hari, opposite Ramón Novarro. When the film was released, it "caused panic with police reserves required to keep the waiting mob in order." [73] The following year, she played a Russian ballerina in Grand Hotel (1932), opposite an ensemble cast, including John Barrymore, Joan Crawford, and Wallace Beery among others.
The film won that year's Academy Award for Best Picture. Both films had been MGM's highest-earning films of 1931 and 1932, respectively, and Garbo was dubbed "the greatest money-making machine ever put on screen."[24][74][75][76] Garbo's close friend Mercedes de Acosta then penned a screenplay for her to portray Joan of Arc[77] but producers rebuffed the idea and the film was shelved. After appearing in As You Desire Me (1932), the first of three Garbo films which co-starred Melvyn Douglas, Garbo's MGM contract expired and she returned to Sweden.
Garbo and Fredric March in Anna Karenina (1935).
Garbo and Robert Taylor in Camille (1936).
Although her domestic popularity was undiminished in the early 1930s, high profits for Garbo's films after Queen Christina in 1933 depended on the foreign market for their success.[80][81] The type of historical and melodramatic films she began to make on the advice of Viertel were highly successful abroad but considerably less so in the United States. In the midst of the Great Depression, American screen audiences seemed to favor "home-grown" screen couples, such as Clark Gable and Jean Harlow.
In 1935, David O. Selznick wanted to cast her as the dying heiress in Dark Victory, but Garbo chose Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina (1935) in which she played another of her renowned roles.[82] Her critically acclaimed performance won her the New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Actress. The film was internationally successful and did better than MGM expected domestically.[83] Still, its profit was significantly diminished because of her exorbitant salary.[84] Garbo selected George Cukor's romantic drama Camille (1936) as her next project.
Thalberg cast her opposite talents Robert Taylor and former co-star, Lionel Barrymore. Cukor carefully crafted Garbo's portrayal of Marguerite Gatier, a lower-class woman, who becomes the world-renowned mistress Camille. Production was marred, however, by the sudden death of Thalberg, then only thirty-seven, which plunged the Hollywood studios into a "state of profound shock," writes David Bret.[85]:272 Garbo had grown close to Thalberg and his wife, Norma Shearer, and had often dropped by their house unannounced. Her grief for Thalberg, some believe, was more profound than for John Gilbert, who died earlier that same year.[85]:272 His death also added to the sombre mood required for the closing scenes of Camille. When the film premiered in New York on 12 December 1936, it became an international success, Garbo's first major success in three years. She won a New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Actress award for her performance, and she was again nominated for an Academy Award.
After the box office failure of Conquest, MGM decided a change of pace was needed to resurrect her declining popularity. For her next movie, the studio teamed her with producer-director Ernst Lubitsch to film Ninotchka, her first comedy. The film was one of the first Hollywood movies which, under the cover of a satirical, light romance, depicted the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin as being rigid and gray when compared to its prewar years. Ninotchka premiered in October 1939, publicized with the catchphrase "Garbo laughs!", commenting on the departure of Garbo's serious and melancholy image as she transferred to comedy. Despite the film's critical favoritism and box office success in the United States and abroad, it was banned in the Soviet Union and its satellites.
Last work and early retirement (1941–1948)[edit]
With George Cukor's Two-Faced Woman (1941), MGM attempted to capitalize on Garbo's success in Ninotchka by casting her in a romantic comedy which sought to portray her as a chic, modern woman. She played a "double" role that featured her dancing the rumba, swimming, and skiing. The film was a critical failure, but, contrary to popular belief, performed reasonably well at the box office.[86] Garbo referred to the film as "my grave."[87] Two-Faced Woman was her last film; she was thirty-six and had made twenty-eight feature films in sixteen years.
Although Garbo was humiliated by the negative reviews of Two-Faced Woman, she did not at first intend to retire.[88][89] But her films depended on the European market and when it fell through with the war, finding a vehicle was problematic for MGM.[90][91] She signed a one-picture deal in 1942 to make The Girl from Leningrad but the project quickly dissolved.[90] She still thought she would continue when the war was over[90][92] though she was ambivalent and indecisive about returning to the screen. Salka Viertel, Garbo's close friend and collaborator, said in 1945 "Greta is impatient to work. But on the other side, she's afraid of it."[93] Garbo also worried about her age. "Time leaves traces on our small faces and bodies. It's not the same anymore, being able to pull it off."[93] George Cukor, director of Two-Faced Woman, and often blamed for its failure, said "People often glibly say that the failure of Two-Faced Woman finished Garbo's career. That's a grotesque oversimplification. It certainly threw her, but I think that what really happened was that she just gave up. She didn’t want to go on."[92]
Personal life[edit]
War service[edit]
During World War II, Garbo secretly worked for MI6.
[115] In tandem with fellow MI6 operative, British-born producer Alexander Korda, they used the pretense of film production to gain access to locations of intelligence interest. Specific accomplishments included
gathering information on Axel Wenner-Gren,
a Swedish millionaire industrialist and reputed friend of Hermann Goering,
and paving the way to a meeting between Danish physicist Niels Bohr and King Gustav V of Sweden, which helped lead to the rescue of the Danish Jews.[116]
Relationships[edit]
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.[144] 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.[145] 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.[145][1][146] "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."[145]
In 1937, she met conductor Leopold Stokowski with whom she had a highly publicized friendship or romance while traveling throughout Europe the following year.[147][148] In his diary, Erich Maria Remarque discusses a liaison with Garbo in 1941[149] and in his memoir, Cecil Beaton described an affair with her in 1947 and 1948.[150][151] 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 Garbo bought an apartment in the same building, "Garbo moved in and took Schlee right away from Valentina."[145] Schlee would split his time between the two, becoming Garbo's close companion and advisor until his death in 1964.[152][153]
Garbo signing her US citizenship papers in 1950
Recent biographers and others believe that Garbo was bisexual or lesbian, and that she had intimate relationships with women as well as with men.[154][155][156][157][158] In 1927 Garbo was introduced to stage and screen actress Lilyan Tashman and they may have had an affair, according to some writers.[159][160] Silent film star Louise Brooks stated that she and Garbo had a brief liaison the following year.[161] In 1931, Garbo befriended the writer and acknowledged lesbian Mercedes de Acosta,[162] introduced to her by her close friend, 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 thirty years during which time Garbo wrote de Acosta 181 letters, cards, and telegrams which are kept at the Rosenbach Museum & Library in Philadelphia.[163][164] Garbo's family, which controls her estate,[165] has made only 87 of them available to the public.[166] In 2005 Mimi Pollak's estate released sixty letters Garbo had written 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".[167] 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.[168]
Death[edit]
Garbo was successfully treated for breast cancer in 1984.[169][170] Towards the end of her life, only Garbo's closest friends knew she was receiving dialysis treatments for six hours 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.
Gravestone of Greta Garbo
Greta Garbo died on 15 April 1990, aged 84, in the hospital, as a result of pneumonia and renal failure.[171] 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.[172]
Garbo had invested wisely, primarily in stocks and bonds, and left her entire estate, $32,042,429—$57,000,000 by 2013 rates—to her niece, Gray Reisfield.[173]
