"One of the most flawless faces and intense women in movie history, with a whiskey-and-cigarettes voice and a mysterious, elusive quality captured forever in her famous line from Grand Hotel, "I vant to be alone."

 

Hi Everyone,

 

I've been away a few days, so there was an interruption in our leading ladies series.  Our next entry is the incandescent Greta Garbo.  Born Greta Lovisa Gustafson September 18, 1905, in Stockholm, Sweden.  Died April 15, 1990, in New York, New York, of pneumonia. 

 

When Swedish film director Mauritz Stiller was brought to the United States by MGM, he insisted on bringing along his protegee, the young Greta Garbo.  In the 1926 film Torrent, the nineteen-year-old Garbo dazzled audiences with her beauty and complex emotions.  Her films with silent screen star John Gilbert (and their offscreen romance) made for big box office as well, and by the end of the silent era she was Hollywood royalty.  Yet the life of a famous movie star was challenging to Garbo.  She was homesick for her beloved Sweden, visiting when she could, and valued her privacy like no other star of her magnitude.  As photographer Cecil Beaton, her devoted friend, once noted dryly, "She would make a secret out of whether she had an egg for breakfast."  After breaking an early engagement to Gilbert, she stated that she would never marry and kept that promise.  Her varied romantic life added to the eroticism of her screen presence, as though Greta contained a passion unbound by contemporary standards.  With the advent of talkies, her career continued to rise; Greta's throaty, accented voice only added to her provocative persona, and she triumphed in a series of movies:  Anna Christie (1930), Grand Hotel (1932), Anna Karenina (1935), and Camille (1937).  She was the "painted lady", wrapped in mysterious desire and lovely agony until director Ernst Lubitsch cast her in his mirthful Ninotchka (1939).  "Garbo laughs!" the ads proclaimed, as though she had never chuckled in a film before, yet the ploy worked - theaters filled with fans wanting to witness the miracle.  When her follow-up comedy Two-Faced Woman (1941) turned into a humiliating debacle, Garbo decided not to make another movie until everything was just right.  That day never came, and Greta Garbo spent the second half of her life rejecting film roles, visiting with friends, traveling the globe, and, eventually, holing up in her New York apartment, to be seen only during her solitary walks.  Although she stayed in the United States, even becoming a citizen in 1951, Garbo belonged to no one: no country, no man, no woman.

 

Essential Garbo Viewing:  Flesh and the Devil (1926), Grand Hotel (1932), Queen Christina (1933), Camille (1936) and Ninotchka (1939).

 

Behind-the-Scenes:  Greta's technique was impressive.  Usually word-perfect on the first take, she made her films quickly.  To achieve this result, the very private actress often banished crew members and even the director from her range of sight.  Visitors on her sets were strictly forbidden.

 

Greta was horrified when the script of Ninotchka required her to play drunk.  She never drank to excess and thought it would make her look cheap.  Director Ernst Lubitsch worked hart to convince Garbo to play the role, even sitting in her car for a two-hour meeting when she refused to come into the studio.  In the end, she compromised by privately filming two shots with costar Melvyn Douglas.  These were later intercut with group scenes of nightclub revelers.

 

An avid art collector, greta loved to be surrounded by beauty.  She amassed an internationally renowned art collection during her lifetime, lining the walls of her posh Manhattan apartment with masterpieces by Renoir, Bonnard, and others.

 

Style Notes:  Greta favored tweeds and trousers - oversized clothes that his her figure but were comfrotable.  Adrian was the first designer to understand that she looked best when one worked with her style.  He put her in high-necked clothes and trench coats, which only underscorded her classic beauty.

 

Plastic surgeons have extolled Greta Garbo's features as flawless.  Off screen, she used just a bit of eyebrow pencil, lipstick, dusting powder, and mascara to look her best.

 

Enjoy the pic!

 

Damon