Greta Garbo

Actress

• Born: September 18, 1905
• Birthplace: Stockholm, Sweden
• Died: April 15, 1990
• Place of death: New York, New York

Swedish-born American actor

A major star in early Hollywood, Garbo was able to exert economic, social, and symbolic influence in a way that no other film actress has. Garbo was one of the few performers to survive the transition from silent to sound films.

Area of achievement Film

Early Life

Greta Garbo (GAHR-boh) was born in Stockholm, Sweden, and lived in poverty on the poor south side of the city. Her father, Karl Alfred, was a laborer (according to some reports, a butcher), and her mother, Anna Lovisa, a house cleaner. Garbo’s lifelong frugality may be related to the impoverished circumstances of her youth.

Garbo was the youngest of three children; she had a sister Alva and a brother Sven. Although she was a good student, Garbo’s studies ended at the age of fourteen when her father became terminally ill. Working in a barber’s shop as a lather girl provided her with money to supplement the family’s income after her father’s death in 1920. By July of 1920, she had found a better job as a shop clerk at Paul U. Bergstrom (known as PUB), a major Stockholm department store. Even at this early date, Garbo had ambitions toward a career in acting. PUB proved to be instrumental in furthering her goals.

Garbo’s first job before the cameras was as a hat model for a PUB catalog. This led to work in filmed commercials for the store and then in 1922 to a theatrical film entitled Luffar-Peter (Peter the Tramp). Garbo quit her job as a shop clerk and concentrated on acting. Her theatrical career progressed rapidly with her acceptance into the Royal Dramatic Theatre Academy, the most highly respected drama school in Sweden. Before she could complete the two-year course, she had left the school to appear in Gösta Berling’s Saga (1924), directed by Moritz Stiller (one of Europe’s greatest directors). When Stiller became Garbo’s mentor, he convinced her to change her name to Garbo, a more theatrical name. The Joyless Street (1925), which was Garbo’s last European film, was a critical and box-office disaster.

Stiller and Garbo caught the attention of Louis B. Mayer, the vice president of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) studios, and were offered contracts to work at MGM in the United States. Mayer was interested in obtaining Stiller as a director but showed little interest in Garbo; he said that she was too fat for an American audience. Stiller refused to come to the United States without Garbo, and thus MGM grudgingly acquired what was to be one of its brightest stars.

Life’s Work

The United States did not greet Garbo with open arms. Only one photographer met her and Stiller on their arrival in New York. After two months, they were called to Hollywood and Garbo was put to work on her first American motion picture, The Torrent (1926), in which she shared the star billing with Ricardo Cortez, a popular actor of the time. The film was an immediate success, in part because of her aloof eroticism, and Garbo became a household name in the United States. Her second MGM film, The Temptress (1926), was a rehash of the first; she had already been typecast as a vamp (sexual vampire). Garbo quickly wearied of the role of “bad woman” and of Hollywood. It was at this time that her image as reclusive, distant, and uncommunicative began. Whether this was a brilliant marketing device, her true personality, or a combination of the two is impossible to determine, but her air of mystery, her role as the “Swedish Sphinx,” and her unwillingness to give interviews became the centerpiece of her persona and added greatly to her mystique (and her box-office value).

After her third American film, Flesh and the Devil (1927), became a major financial and critical hit, Garbo went on strike for a higher salary and for more control over the roles she was to play. Her strike lasted for seven months and resulted in a pay raise from six hundred dollars a week to five thousand dollars a week. Within two years, Garbo had become a major power in Hollywood, one of the few who successfully bucked the studio system then in place.

Whereas Garbo had become a star, her friend and former director Stiller was unable to work in the American film industry. He returned to Sweden in 1928 and died shortly thereafter. Garbo made seven more silent films Love (1927), The Divine Woman (1928), Mysterious Lady (1928), A Woman of Affairs (1929), Wild Orchids (1929), The Single Standard (1929), and The Kiss (1929) and became one of the most popular female stars in Hollywood. She brought in large revenues from both American and European markets.

The transition to sound film was greatly feared by many silent-film actors, and Garbo’s voice was eagerly anticipated. She maintained her on-screen silence for two years after sound came to Hollywood. Her first vocal vehicle was carefully chosen to use her Swedish accent to best effect. The film that introduced Garbo’s voice to American audiences was Eugene O’Neill’s Anna Christie (1930), a story about a young Swedish immigrant and her reunion with her father, who is unaware of her sordid past. The script was written to create the maximum suspense; Garbo does not appear until well into the picture, and then she stands without speaking for another minute. The advertising campaign for the film emphasized the novelty that “Garbo Talks!” and the English-speaking world listened. Her first spoken words on screen were “Gif me a Viskey. Ginger Ale on the side. . . . And don’t be stingy, baby.” A German-language version of Anna Christie was made to introduce the “voice heard ’round the world” to a non-English-speaking audience as well.

Garbo’s conquest of sound films placed her firmly at the center of MGM’s pantheon of stars but did nothing to change her public reclusiveness. To capitalize on her success, MGM gave her six films in the next two years: Romance (1930), Inspiration (1931), Susan Lennox: Her Fall and Rise (1931), Mata Hari (1931), Grand Hotel (1932), and As You Desire Me (1932). It was in Grand Hotel that she uttered what was to become her defining phrase: “I vant to be alone.”

As a result of her popularity, she was able to negotiate a contract that made her the highest-paid actress in Hollywood ($250,000 per film in 1933). She also demanded creative control over her films. The role of Queen Christina (1933) reflected many aspects of Garbo’s persona: sexual ambiguity, solitude, and reclusiveness. The final shot of Queen Christina is one of the most powerful images of Garbo: She is gazing out to sea, her face completely blank, the audience writing its own story on her canvas.

Her next film, The Painted Veil (1934), was a financial and critical failure. Against the wishes of the studio, Garbo chose to star in yet another costume drama, Anna Karenina (1935). The film was a success. She received the New York Film Critics award for “best feminine performance” for Anna Karenina and another in 1937 for Camille (1936). The latter is considered to be her finest performance. After Camille, Garbo made only three more films. Europe was preparing for war, and the market for screen goddesses was changing. The failure in 1937 of Conquest was followed by a transformation of Garbo’s screen persona with the release of Ninotchka (1939), her first comedy since Luffar-Peter. The picture was marketed with the slogan “Garbo Laughs” and was a commercial and critical success. In an attempt to recast Garbo as an “all-American” girl, Two-Faced Woman was released in 1941 to disastrous reviews and to almost universal condemnation and censorship for its apparent condoning of adultery.

With European markets closed by war and with the failure of Two-Faced Woman, Garbo parted from MGM and from filmmaking. In all, Garbo made twenty-five films (including the German version of Anna Christie) for MGM. According to critics, only a few of these were worthy vehicles for an actor of her caliber.

From 1941 to 1990, Garbo stayed in retirement, living on the money she had invested. Although she never married, she was romantically linked to a number of men and women throughout her life; her strong desire for privacy makes confirmation of any details of her personal life almost impossible. In 1951 she became a U.S. citizen, and in 1954 she was awarded a special Academy Award “for a series of luminous performances.” Although she was photographed from time to time as she walked the streets of her chosen home, New York City, her career before the public eye had ended.

On Easter Sunday in 1990, Garbo died as secretively as she had lived. Her remains were cremated at an undisclosed location, and the official cause of death was not released.

Significance

Garbo’s influence on American and European culture was enormous. One of the largest box-office draws of all time, her face and name were instantly recognizable throughout the Western world. However, Garbo’s celebrity was achieved without constant media hype, without press conferences and interviews; her fame derived, in great part, from her secrecy. She granted her only major interview in 1928.

In the 1930’s, her on-screen hairstyles and clothing (the latter were designed by the Hollywood costumer Adrian) were copied by women around the world. Caricatures of her appeared in cartoons; she was the central topic of a James Thurber story, “The Breaking Up of the Winships”; her salary was mentioned in the Cole Porter tune “You’re the Top”; and her image was cast in plaster and sold to decorate mantels and pianos. More than fifty years after her retirement from motion pictures, her film revivals continued to command large audiences, and numerous books have been published exploring her film career and her image.

Garbo is considered to be one of the great actors of the modern era, even though her films themselves are not always viewed as being exemplary. Camille, however, often appears on film critics’ lists of the best films of all times.

Perhaps Garbo’s greatest significance was as a major power player in Hollywood. Even in a male-dominated industry she was able to enforce her standards of filmmaking. She chose the roles she wanted to play, and she was able to demand a salary comparable to any male actor, because her name alone was enough to ensure a film’s profitability. Garbo commanded a level of respect and economic clout that no other female actor could approach.

Bibliography

Affron, Charles. Star Acting: Gish, Garbo, Davis. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1977. An excellent overview of three important actors from the early period of Hollywood. This work puts Garbo’s acting ability and star power into perspective by comparing her with her contemporaries. This book focuses more on Garbo’s craft as an actor and less on her role as a star.

Bainbridge, John. Garbo. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1955. This is the best and most widely available biography of Garbo. There is some discussion of the early, pre-Hollywood period, but this work mainly documents her rise as a star, though focusing on her essential humanity. It has only a few illustrations.

Conway, Michael, Dion McGregor, and Mark Ricci. The Films of Greta Garbo. New York: Citadel, 1968. A complete, fully illustrated discussion of all of Garbo’s films. Stills from each film are accompanied by a synopsis of the script and representative reviews by contemporary critics. The opening essay by Parker Tyler is an excellent exploration of Garbo as icon.

Daum, Raymond W. Walking with Garbo: Conversations and Recollections. New York: HarperCollins, 1991. This biography of Garbo includes some of her last recorded thoughts. Well illustrated and filled with personal asides by the author, a friend and confidant of Garbo’s.

Gronowicz, Antoni. Garbo. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990. This intimate account of Garbo by poet Gronowicz was withheld from publication until after her death. This provocative book attempts to address the questions of her early childhood, her sexuality, and her reasons for leaving Hollywood.

Vieira, Mark A. Greta Garbo: A Cinematic Legacy. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2005. Vieira provides background information on all of Garbo’s films. The book includes more than three hundred black-and-white photographs.

Walker, Alexander. Garbo: A Portrait. New York: Macmillan, 1980. A lavishly illustrated book filled with early (pre-Hollywood) photographs, stills from Garbo’s films, advertisements, and post-Hollywood photos. This is the MGM-authorized version of Garbo’s career; thus, it includes memos, contracts, and other documentation not available to earlier authors. The text is interesting, but the photographs are the major reason to consult this book.

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