Why Greta Garbo really disappeared – and her five films you have to see

NZ Herald

02-05-2025

In the process, though, she developed a crippling case of buyer's remorse. 'I want to be alone,' she remarked in Grand Hotel (1932) – the line that first became her most famous catchphrase, and then, seemingly, her life's motto.
A 2025 documentary on Sky, Garbo: Where Did You Go?, tackles the identity crisis she went through in creating Greta Garbo, then turning her back on that very persona.
She was born Greta Lovisa Gustafsson in 1905, the third child of factory workers. Their flat was in Södermalm, known then as the 'slum' of Stockholm, and there were no expectations for Greta to amount to anything. She might not have done, if it weren't for a fascination with theatre at school, and the first job that got her noticed, as a department store's fashion model.
The Svengali who propelled her to fame was the Finnish filmmaker Mauritz Stiller, then the second-most important figure in Sweden's burgeoning silent cinema (behind The Wind director Victor Sjöström). Garbo's relationship with Stiller was fraught, both professionally and romantically (both were bisexual).
He plucked Garbo out of drama school and cast her in the romantic epic The Saga of Gösta Berling (1924) – not playing the lead, but in an emotionally demanding supporting role. Her screen presence proved so electric that a private viewing of the film enraptured Louis B Mayer, who brought her to Hollywood with Stiller and enlisted his second-in-command at MGM, Irving Thalberg, to sculpt her into the star she became.
She was told to lose weight and get her teeth fixed – easily done. As Annette Talpert wrote in a book about Golden Age Hollywood glamour, 'Garbo's face was so well proportioned that, for years, plastic surgeons proclaimed it the hallmark of perfection.'
From the start, though, she was unhappy with the roles MGM foisted upon her. According to Norma Shearer (Thalberg's wife), 'She didn't like playing the exotic, the sophisticated, the woman of the world.' After all, she was barely 20 when she got top-billing in such racy entertainments as The Temptress (1926) – a chaotically expensive romp, which saw Stiller replaced by another director – and Flesh and the Devil (1926), which paired her for the first of three times with a male megastar of the day, John Gilbert.
Their scorching love scenes were much talked about, and gained scandalous voltage because everyone knew Garbo and Gilbert were entwined off-screen, too. By their third vehicle, A Woman of Affairs (1928), Garbo had replaced the silent doyenne Lillian Gish as Hollywood's top-grossing star.
MGM's main worry was that Garbo's Swedish accent would be her undoing. In fact, though, she was among the few, lucky silent stars who survived the transition to sound with their marquee value only boosted. 'Garbo Talks!' trumpeted the ads for her first sound film, the stagey Eugene O'Neill adaptation Anna Christie (1930), which cashed in on that slogan to become, bizarrely, a major hit: she was playing a downtrodden Swedish ex-brothel-worker getting soused on a barge in Provincetown.
Her first line sets the tone: 'Gimme a whiskey, ginger ale on the side, and don't be stingy, baby!' Critics rhapsodised about her command of English – fluent by now – and how ideally her speaking voice, a husky contralto, fitted her established persona. Indeed, she was so comfortable in this second tongue that Anna's Swedish accent needed beefing up in retakes. She'd score her first of three Best Actress Oscar nominations.
These were Garbo's glory years – the years of Grand Hotel, of renegotiating her MGM contract, and insisting on the lavish period drama Queen Christina (1933) ('Garbo Returns!') as her next vehicle.
She would flex her power in the industry for as long as it lasted. MGM wanted Charles Boyer or Laurence Olivier as her leading man. Over her dead body. She demanded they bring back her ex-lover Gilbert, even though his career was in serious decline, his fourth marriage a year off divorce, and his health succumbing to the terminal alcoholism that would cause his death in 1936.
Playing Sweden's 17th-century monarch was the type of serious acting challenge Garbo most relished, letting her play a strong-willed woman of destiny in modishly masculine attire. Yet even this experience was dismaying. She fretted about how the film would be received in her native Sweden, paranoid about historical absurdities. 'Just imagine Christina abdicating for the sake of a little Spaniard!' she wrote to a friend.
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Garbo's aversion to publicity was already infamous. There's a picture of her in New York in 1938, surrounded by a pack of scribbling reporters. Her gaze, somewhere above their heads, is as trapped and tragic as many of her major characters. On her infrequent return trips to her beloved motherland, the situation was even worse – as a national icon, she ignited a frenzy of well-wishing curiosity. Achieving any kind of privacy was next to impossible.
At the outset of her career, Garbo was content to be photographed in controlled circumstances, accepting this as a necessary aspect of stardom. But she couldn't deal with the stalking, scandal-mongering attentions of photojournalists out on the streets. While the term 'paparazzo' wasn't coined until La Dolce Vita (1960), the profession certainly pre-dated that. Indeed, the mass production of compact Leica cameras, which became all the rage for snooping freelancers, coincided with the very years that Garbo's stardom peaked.
Nothing triggered demand for 'candid' Garbo snaps more than her obvious loathing for having her privacy invaded. Much like Diana, she faced relentless pursuit and harassment that was very real, and irrevocably soured her relationship with celebrity.
The more she was labelled a 'recluse' – especially in her post-retirement years, when she became a US citizen and settled in New York City – the more value these stolen images of Garbo began to hold. If they fed into the myth – say, showing one hand held up to block the lens, and one displeased eye peering out – so much the better.
There was no waning phase of Garbo's acting career. One of her brightest hits, Ernst Lubitsch's jaunty romcom Ninotchka, delighted everyone ('Garbo Laughs!'). If Ninotchka hadn't had the bad luck to come out in Hollywood's greatest year, 1939, she'd surely have won that elusive Oscar. (She lost to Vivien Leigh for Gone with the Wind.) It would prove to be her penultimate film. The last one was George Cukor's poorly received Two-Faced Woman (1941), because a purported comeback in 1949 with The Duchess of Langeais amounted to nothing when she simply changed her mind.
After that, she reverted as far as she could to being Greta Lovisa Gustafsson – albeit as a New Yorker, since the residents of Södermalm would never have left her alone.
For all that the 'recluse' label was stamped upon her for the next half-century, Lorna Tucker's Sky documentary argues that this was largely a media fiction, and that Garbo's private life was more hedonistic and sillier than anyone knew at the time. Indeed, it was often happy. She had long affairs, including with the fashion designer Cecil Beaton and the playwright Mercedes de Acosta. She partied – privately – with the likes of Charlie Chaplin and Truman Capote.
She simply avoided the press, turned away from every camera she spotted, and walked the streets of Manhattan incognito in trench coats and broad-rimmed hats. 'I want to be left alone,' she once clarified about what she had really said in Grand Hotel – the suggestion being that she merely wanted to choose her company, and live in a protected bubble. The difference may be subtle, but it's everything.
Greta Garbo's five essential films
1. Grand Hotel (Edmund Goulding, 1932)
In this Best Picture-winning ensemble stunner, Garbo ruled the roost as the prima ballerina Gruzinskaya, whose career – ironically – is on the descent. She's the most famous permanent resident of Berlin's Grand Hotel, with fellow guests played by the likes of Joan Crawford, Wallace Berry and both Barrymores (John and Lionel), making this the starriest attraction the early talkies had yet seen. It also set the template for all films in which narratives converge around a single location, paving the way for the likes of Murder on the Orient Express and, naturally, The Grand Budapest Hotel. As an aloof diva who contemplates suicide, Garbo found a role which let her express the alienation of being so famous.
2. Queen Christina (Rouben Mamoulian, 1933)
This was the role she simply could not be refused: after a sojourn home in Sweden, and the end of her original MGM contract, she demanded $250,000 per film, and chose this risky project to mark her return. Christina, Sweden's most celebrated female monarch, is perhaps Garbo's single most defining character, a monarch as steely as Elizabeth I for different reasons: her refusal to marry, secret conversion to Catholicism, and eventual decision to relinquish the throne. While Garbo was never happy with the love story – despite enlisting John Gilbert to help her through it – the pageantry is top-notch, and the final close-up of Christina facing her future on a ship's prow is immortal.
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3. Anna Karenina (Clarence Brown, 1935)
This was very much Garbo in her peak 'tragic women of destiny' phase – outstripping her peer and close friend Katharine Hepburn, who was busy making a string of flops along similar lines. It was Garbo's second stab at playing Tolstoy's doomed adulteress: she had made a silent version called Love (1927), opposite Gilbert as Count Vronsky, which was a huge success. So was this, pairing her with the infallible Fredric March, but focusing more intently on her private anguish. It compresses 900-odd pages of plot into a tidy 95-minute frame – not one for purists, but alluringly moody, with striking use of steam, shadow and the train's rhythmic chuffing, all beckoning Anna to her fate.
4. Camille (George Cukor, 1936)
Cukor may have directed Garbo in her swansong – which he later castigated as 'lousy' and 'most unfortunate' – but he also coaxed her most heart-piercing turn in this classic example of a 1930s 'women's picture'. Pedigree, again, was key: it was the umpteenth adaptation of the book and play La Dame aux Camélias by Alexandre Dumas fils. Garbo glowed as the courtesan heroine Marguerite Gautier, who falls for a low-born charmer (Robert Taylor) but is struck down by consumption before she can find true happiness. The star left no dry eyes with her coughing demise at the end, and was Oscar-nominated for a second time. 'Garbo Dies,' they might have quipped.
5. Ninotchka (Ernst Lubitsch, 1939)
This was the three-sentence story idea that dramatist Melchior Lengyel pitched to MGM at a poolside meeting. 'Russian girl saturated with Bolshevist ideals goes to fearful, capitalistic, monopolistic Paris. She meets romance and has an uproarious good time. Capitalism not so bad, after all.' Beyond the satire, it was a perfect chance to show off the funny side of Garbo that audiences had never seen – especially with Billy Wilder taking a hand in the script, and Lubitsch, a master of sophisticated comedy, calling the shots. The plot revolves around jewellery stolen during the Russian Revolution, until Garbo's frosty Soviet envoy Nina Yakushova melts, gloriously, under the attentions of Melvyn Douglas's suave Count Léon.