September 5, 2005. Copyright 2005, Graphic News. All rights reserved

Greta Garbo: centenary of the star who wanted to be alone
By Elisabeth Ribbans

LONDON, September 5, Graphic News:  A hundred years after her birth and more than 60 years after her last motion picture, Greta GarboÕs name still hangs above the history of cinema with a neon glow, a byword for glamour, mystique and almost mesmerising luminosity. One of the few great stars to make the successful leap from silent movies to talkies -- with roughly a dozen films in each genre -- Garbo created a legend from a relatively short career. Her first film in which she played a major role, as a countess in The Story of Goesta Berling, was made in her native Sweden in 1924. Her last, an indifferent Hollywood comedy, Two-Faced Woman, came in 1941, when she was just 36 years old. But in between Greta Garbo had become one of the worldÕs most popular movie stars, famous for her portrayals of often headstrong but captivating women in films such as Mata Hari (1931), Queen Christina (1934) -- for which she insisted that John Gilbert, her one-time paramour and frequent co-star in the silent era, was cast instead of Laurence Olivier as her lover -- and Anna Karenina (1935). Throughout it all, this epitome of Hollywood sex appeal remained publicity-shy and extremely private, eschewing her own premieres and often insisting that her scenes were shot on closed sets. This only added to the intrigue.
Born Greta Lovisa GustafssonÊin Stockholm on September 18, 1905, the future movie icon grew up in an impoverished neighbourhood, leaving school at 14 and taking a variety of shop jobs before being spotted while working in a department store by film director Erik Petschler, who gave her a small role in his 1922 film, Luffarpetter (Peter the Tramp). For the next two years she studied at the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm, before Mauritz Stiller, a Swedish film pioneer who directed her in Goesta Berling, secured her a contract with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.
For GarboÕs Hollywood debut in 1926, MGM cast her opposite Ricardo Cortez, in Torrent, a tale of forbidden love. There then followed a series of romantic pictures, many with Gilbert, including Flesh and the Devil (1927) -- the first of seven collaborations with her Òfavourite directorÓ Clarence Brown -- and A Woman of Affairs (1928).
Hard to believe that until this point, GarboÕs husky, accented, soon-to-be-trademark voice had yet to be heard. But that was about to change. In 1930, a screen adaptation of Eugene OÕNeillÕs stage play, Anna Christie, was advertised with the slogan: ÒGarbo talksÓ. And so, playing the filmÕs eponymous prostitute, she delivered her opening lines -- ÒGimme a whisky, ginger ale on the side. And donÕt be stingy, babyÓ. Unlike many others silent stars, who literally talked themselves out of a job, Garbo proved a hit, garnering for this role the first of four Oscar nominations -- others followed for Romance (also 1930), Camille (1936), and Ninotchka (1939), in which she reveals her gift for comedy.
But in 1941 Garbo retired from the movies, allegedly explaining herself by saying ÒI want to be aloneÓ, a line borrowed from her 1932 classic role as the ageing ballerina in Grand Hotel. From then on she lived as a virtual recluse, mostly at her apartment in New York. Despite being one of MGMÕs highest-paid stars, Garbo -- perhaps remembering her poverty-stricken childhood -- was extremely frugal. When she died in April 1990, she left an estate worth $20 million to her niece.
Great Garbo, who may have had affairs with both sexes, never married. Neither did she win an Oscar. But in 1954 the Academy awarded her an honorary Oscar for Òher unforgettable screen performancesÓ. True to style, she did not attend the ceremony.
/ENDS