THAT FACE.  EXQUISITELY BEAUTIFUL, yet possessed of an undefinable, haunting sadness.  Languidly indifferent, yet capable of projecting immense passion.  No screen actress has survived the camera's scrutiny with such detachment or exploited its mythmaking powers so effectively.  And no face save Garbo's has communicated deep emotion with the same contradictory mix of intensity and calm.

When Greta Garbo - born Greta Lovisa Gustafsson - was fourteen, her father, a Stockholm landscapist, passed away.  The subsequent death of her sister increased Garbo's sense of abandonment, making her hypersensitive and wary of both commitment and betrayal.  Her arrival in Hollywood from her native Sweden in 1925 was almost an afterthought; Louis B. Mayer was humoring the talent he was really after - Garbo's mentor and lover, director Mauritz Stiller.  A Helsinki-born son of Russian-Polish Jewish parents who had found his protégée studying at the Royal Dramatic Academy in Stockholm, Stiller perceived a shimmering butterfly in the frumpy seventeen-year-old Garbo and cast her as the second lead in the four-hour silent Gösta Berling's Saga (1924).  The movie immediately conferred starlet status upon Garbo, a fact that had much to do with Stiller's insistence that his ingenue lose twenty pounds and have her teeth capped.  Even so, MGM - who had accepted Stiller's rather unremarkable companion as part of a package deal - could find no marketable image for her until her own taciturn manner with the press created her "Swedish Sphinx" persona.

In 1925 Garbo began shooting her first MGM film, The Torrent, Vicente Blasco-Ibáñez's story of a Spanish aristocrat whose mother prevents his marriage to a poor young girl living on their estate.  In spite of the pedestrian script, the rushes were breathtaking, revealing to the studio's executives the exciting phenomenon Stiller had insisted was there all along.  Garbo was incandescent.  The camera loved her from any angle, and she projected an intoxicating eroticism.  Stiller, on the other hand, was finished; MGM replaced him on The Temptress, his first film with Garbo, and he returned to Sweden, where he died two years later.

Paired with John Gilbert in Flesh and the Devil in 1927, and almost immediately afterward in Love, an adaptation of Anna Karenina, Garbo soon developed a more assured screen presence, though she relied to a great extent on Gilbert's personal direction.  The two stars were probably romantically involved - a fact that seemed obvious to titillated audiences - but Garbo ended the affair the year the silent-film star spoke her first line in the 1930 blockbuster Anna Christie.  By then she was MGM's darling, and nothing was too good for their number-one box-office attraction except perhaps well-written movies.  In truth, it was one of Garbo's triumphs that she seemed capable of redeeming any screenplay, which she often had to.  Of the twenty-four movies she made for MGM, the scripts were uniformly mediocre, the great exception, of course, being Ernst Lubitsch's delightful Ninotchka (1939).  But the rest of the trappings were first-rate: Expensive sets, extravagant costumes, talented directors, and brilliant cameramen were all mustered to contribute to the Garbo aura.  In return, she gave MGM her best.  An untrained actress well aware of her shortcomings, she reached the accomplished level of her performances through intense concentration, gut-level intuition, and a professional pliability her gifted directors used to their advantage.

Garbo worked hard at her craft, but at the end of the day her personal curtain of privacy would always ring down.  Director Clarence Brown remarked that 'when she was done, she was through.' A maid would walk onto the set and hand Garbo a glass of water, and the actress would say good night and leave.  The more reclusive the actress became, the more her public wanted to know about Garbo's presumably exciting private life.  But the actress was unyielding about  her right to privacy; she both needed to perform and to withdraw.  Defying Hollywood convention, the movie star refused to sign autographs or grant interviews-or to attend her own premieres.  Even her own studio failed to obtain her telephone number.  In later years she argued that she had never meant to give such a frosty impression, but it seems evident that when the mainly celibate Garbo uttered the line “I want to be alone” in Grand Hotel (1932), she really meant it.  That she also had a sense of humor about these hide-and-seek games is clear too, from the charming scene in Ninotchka when she is asked, “Do you want to be alone, comrade?” In response, the dour Bolshevik roars, “No!”

Garbo loved to disguise herself - 'Miss Harriet Brown' was one of her favorite alternative identities.  She was unconventional in even more provocative ways as well.  If her whereabouts were a puzzle, her sexual orientation was a flat-out mystery.  Of course, Garbo herself may have deliberately fed the rumors by juxtaposing torrid affairs with her leading men with whispered liaisons involving beauties of her own gender.  Whatever her intentions, this elusive, ambiguous sensuality was perfect grist for MGM's publicity mill.

Her status secure with successes such as Queen Christina (1933), Anna Karenina (1935), and Camille (1936), Garbo made salary demands that soon turned her into something of a fiscal millstone for MGM.  After Two-Faced Woman (1941), an ill-fated attempt to transform her into a comedienne, Garbo, at the young age of thirty-six, went into temporary retirement to wait out World War II.  But as hostilities dragged on, the famous recluse eventually withdrew more and more completely - the camera, after all, was no longer so kind, and one needed little imagination to foresee the fate of an aging siren.  Her preemptive exit left her sublime beauty intact and her legend indelible.

(mini-biography @ B. Cady)

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