Latest news with #Garbo
New European
27-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New European
No, Greta Garbo didn't want to be alone
The suave 47-year-old said nothing. He simply picked up his fountain pen and drew a large rectangle on the back of an envelope in black ink to represent a billboard. And then, inside it, he wrote just two words: 'Garbo Talks!'. In less than five seconds, he had delivered an unimprovable marketing slogan. Frank Whitbeck was a big deal at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. He had acted in and produced a few big films for the studio but by the late 1920s was in possession of a key to the executive washroom as chief of the gloriously titled 'Publicity/Exploitation Department.' Over the next two decades, he would feature as narrator in dozens of films and voice theatrical trailers for classics such as National Velvet and The Wizard of Oz, but it is what happened in a hitherto uninspiring meeting to discuss promotion for forthcoming major release Anna Christie that cements his place in movie history. Anna Christie featured MGM's (and, at that point, the world's) most bankable and fascinating movie star, Greta Garbo, in a film that would make or break her career. Warner Brothers had released The Jazz Singer two years earlier, 'talkies' were taking over and while MGM had begun to follow suit, they were worried that Garbo's Swedish accent would stop her making a successful transition from silent films. The actress shared their trepidation. At 2.30am on the day filming in sound began – October 14, 1929 – she called her young compatriot Wilhelm Sörenson and demanded he come round to her mansion on Chevy Chase Drive in Beverly Hills to drink coffee with her. At 6am, on their way to the studio, he heard a voice from underneath the rug beside him in the car. '[It was] the moving plaint of a little girl,' he recalled later. 'Oh, Sören, I feel like an unborn child just now.'' Yet the concerns of both studio and actress were laughably unnecessary. About 16 minutes into Anna Christie, the queen of working a pause and holding the attention of the audience enters a down-at-heel bar stage right, shoots a stare at the barkeeper and, clearly carrying heavy baggage both literal and metaphorical, slumps into a wooden chair. Pause. All eyes (and ears) on Garbo. ANNA: 'Gimme a whiskey. Ginger ale on the side… And don't be stingy, baby.' BARMAN: 'Shall I serve it in a pail?' ANNA: 'That suits me down to the ground.' Garbo's Anna Christie is very far from being a 'little girl' or any of the other characters she had become famous for playing during the silent era. As Robert Gottlieb, one of her many biographers, put it, she had been 'the prima donna, the vamp, the spy, the flaunter of furs and jewels, the doomed driver of an Hispano-Suiza, the murderess, the mistress of Deco'. For this part, the most important of her career, she was to play a cynical, shambolic, world-weary former prostitute seeking comfort from the bottom of a glass. The performance was sophisticated and acclaimed but almost lost to the reaction of an adoring audience finally putting a voice to the beautiful face they had already fallen in love with. The Herald Tribune gushed: 'Her voice is revealed as a deep, husky, throaty contralto that possesses every bit of that fabulous poetic glamour that has made this distant Swedish lady the outstanding actress of the motion picture world.' American film magazine Picture Play went route one with 'The voice that shook the world!' Anna Christie helped earn Garbo her an Academy Award nomination for best actress in 1930. By the time Grand Hotel was released in 1932 she was the top box-office draw in the world. Less than a decade later, at the age of just 36, she would shock the world once again by announcing a complete withdrawal from Hollywood and the high-profile celebrity lifestyle associated with it – a 'temporary retirement' that would last 49 years. As exhausted ballerina Grusinskaya in Grand Hotel, Garbo had delivered her most iconic line: 'I want to be alone'. It had been appropriated even before she retired as a shorthand explanation for her reluctance to give interviews and or be photographed in public, but now it survives as a de facto five-word epitaph and explanation for her incredible life and the sudden decision to turn her back on Hollywood. It lends her an enduring mystique, but is also key to a resurgence in her popularity among a new generation intrigued by the idea of one of the most glamorous and famous women in the world seemingly determined to reverse-engineer something like a normal life for herself. Add rumours about her private life (she never married but had a number of documented love affairs including one with silent-movie star John Gilbert and, it has been suggested, liaisons with several women including Marlene Dietrich, Billie Holiday and writer Mercedes de Acosta), her subsequent status as both an LGBTQ+ icon (her lead in Queen Christina, playing up her androgyny to the max, is now regarded as a gay cinema classic) and an exemplar of timeless style and it is not hard to detect a note of longing and loss in the title of Sky Arts' new documentary, Garbo: Where Did You Go?. British film-maker Lorna Tucker had access to home movie footage from one of Garbo's Swedish friends, archive phone calls and over 200 unpublished letters belonging to Garbo's great-nephew Scott Reisfield, who has also just written Greta Garbo and The Rise of the Modern Woman. It joins at least another five other biographies published since 2020 but both Tucker and Reisfield present us with an unfamiliar Garbo, one that challenges the 'I want to be alone' cliche. The documentary shows her relaxing and enjoying time with friends, larking about for the camera, guard dropped, being silly and enjoying life, while Reisfield's letters reveal the domestic Garbo talking about moving back to Sweden with her family and buying a farm, the emotional Garbo who writes a note to herself on the death of longtime intimate George Schlee in 1964 and the ambitious post-retirement Garbo talking of future acting roles and directing films. 'The whole 'Garbo is a recluse' meme was a media creation,' laughs the 67-year-old from his home in Colorado. 'Sure, she was private. But not in a JD Salinger kind of way… Yes, she did sometimes hold her hand up to ruin a paparazzi shot, but that then became the shot and the story around it would be: 'This is a woman who never goes out,' but she did go out.' Tucker agrees. 'She partied like mad but just at friends' houses,' the director points out. 'She was having a wild time, but in private.' Garbo hated the constant harassment that began in earnest on a trip to New York in 1931 (a development many consider to be the birth of paparazzi-style reportage) and was aware of but powerless to resist the vicious circle that came with it. The more she kicked back against the attention, the bigger the story, the more valuable the next photo, the more photographers chasing the money, the more coverage and column inches she received, the more famous she became. 'There were plenty of people who stalked Garbo,' claims Reisfield, 'And people who came to LA to marry her but there was no infrastructure, like there is in the current celebrity culture, to insulate her from that.' Unsurprisingly, perhaps, she soon became psychologically intimidated by crowds to the extent that it became an issue she needed to work through with psychiatrists. At the same time, chased everywhere by the world's press, she had nowhere to hide but, as both documentary and book are at pains to point out, just because she wanted to be alone it did not necessarily mean she shunned personal contact. In fact, there is still a debate in certain quarters about whether her signature line in Grand Hotel was actually 'I want to be let alone' rather than 'I want to be alone'. Garbo had mischievously suggested as much in an interview shortly after the film was released. 'There is all the difference,' she went on to add. The actress had no children but was very close to Scott's mother Gray Reisfield, her brother's daughter, who inherited her entire estate in 1990. 'I think of Garbo's presence in my life as like a bonus grandparent,' says her great-nephew now. 'I didn't have the relationship with her my mom had, which was much closer, but she would come to our house or we would meet her in New York. I have a whole bunch of memories of her doing cartwheels or walking with her so she was in my life over decades and you just get a sense of a person even as a kid. 'That gave me background knowledge that other biographers do not have in order to strip out certain bogus sources that cashed in by talking to the press back in the day but who were not necessarily telling the truth. That's when you get a different picture of Garbo. The real one.' It's the same person who emerges in the documentary: A woman tired of the studio ('MGM is pretty rotten'), its lack of artistic integrity ('Many of the directors here know nothing about emotional life') and, of course, the whole Hollywood machine ('They're marrying me for the 759th time, can you think of anything lower than the people who are in charge of this so-called art I'm part of?'). But not tired of life. To answer the question posed by Tucker's film, Garbo: Where Did You Go? directly, after she quit in 1941 she went wherever she could go to avoid the stalkers, fans and photographers. She moved to Manhattan in 1951, taking quarters in the Hotel Ritz Tower on Park Avenue and then Hampshire House before moving to the seven-room apartment at 450 East Fifty-Second Street in 1953 that she would call home for the rest of her life. Hidden in plain sight, she loved to go shopping behind a large pair of sunglasses and/or a hat. She threw herself into collecting art (and at one point owned three Renoirs) and expensive pieces of furniture including a carved Louis XV chair that lived next to a dime-store blow-up snowman in her apartment. She dated, maintained relationships and was still being propositioned at the age of 80. She holidayed extensively but always to places where she knew she could be herself. 'Her year had a pattern and she did similar things at the same time every year,' says Riesfield. 'So she would always go to Europe, in the 1950s it was mostly on the French Riviera but from 1960 on, even if she went to the Riviera for a couple of weeks, she then spent most of the fall in Klosters. She would always go to California or New Mexico and often Wisconsin because there was no media covering her there, but I think she thought of herself as more European than American, and then after that, maybe a citizen of the world.' It doesn't read much like a woman who has chosen isolation because she wants 'to be alone', does it? It reads more like the life of a modern and emancipated woman years ahead of her time and living life on her own terms with the financial freedom her own remarkable talent and hard work has earned. One story has it that a fan recognised her at a road junction in Manhattan in the late 1950s and asked: 'Are you Greta Garbo?' To which she simply replied, 'I was Greta Garbo'. Then, without waiting for either the signal or a response, she crossed the street. Garbo: Where Did You Go? is on Sky Arts, Freeview and streaming service NOW Bill Borrows is a journalist, feature writer and columnist
NZ Herald
02-05-2025
- Entertainment
- NZ Herald
Why Greta Garbo really disappeared – and her five films you have to see
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. Advertise with NZME. 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. Advertise with NZME. 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.
Telegraph
01-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Why Greta Garbo really disappeared – and her five films you have to see
No star has ever retired as successfully, completely, and without fuss as Greta Garbo. This Swedish-American icon of the silver screen didn't even make a formal announcement when she decided to hang up her hat. Still, it was an impressively clean break which lasted far longer than her stardom itself. Compared with today's celebrities, forever issuing self-conscious statements about scaling back their careers, Garbo's scorched-earth disappearance is a model, not of talking the talk, but walking the walk. Away. She was everywhere – and then, quite suddenly, nowhere. The year was 1941. Garbo was only 35, and her disillusionment with Hollywood's creative process would brook no more disagreements. All she had ever wanted to be was globally renowned as an actress. She had achieved that fivefold, becoming the most famous woman on the planet, not to mention known as the most beautiful – something like her era's Princess Diana, if we go by the relentless press coverage. 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, fit 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. And 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. 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 to 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 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. Available to rent on Apple TV, Amazon Prime and Sky 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. Available to rent on Apple TV and Amazon Prime 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. Available to rent on Apple TV and Amazon Prime 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. Available to rent on Apple TV and Amazon Prime 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 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. Available to rent on Apple TV and Amazon Prime
The Guardian
28-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Greta Garbo documentary reveals star as ‘a relaxed, silly, funny person'
She is remembered as the ultimate reclusive film star, following her shock retirement at the height of her success. But the enduring image of Greta Garbo is being challenged by a new documentary, which will show that, far from withdrawing from life – as in her most famous line, 'I want to be alone' – she lived it to the full, partying with close friends. The British film-maker Lorna Tucker has been given access to previously unseen behind the scenes footage in which the star, once described as 'the most alluring, vibrant and yet aloof character ever to grace the motion picture screen', can be seen larking about and laughing. The footage shows a relaxed, silly, funny person,' Tucker said. 'We see that the most famous woman in the world was actually very silly, very normal. But she also hungered for privacy to live out her life.' The footage has come from one of Garbo's Swedish friends. Tucker has also been given access to more than 200 unpublished letters by Garbo's grand-nephew, Scott Reisfield, who welcomed the documentary for showing another side to the star in her later life. He said: 'The whole 'Garbo is a recluse' meme was a media creation. Sure, she was private. But not in a JD Salinger kind of way … Yes, she did sometimes hold her hand up to ruin the shot, but that became the shot. Paparazzi sold the idea of Garbo hiding because it made them more money.' The documentary, titled Garbo: Where Did You Go?, is an artistic exploration of the myth and mystique of an actor revered for her ethereal screen presence and described by the actor-director Orson Welles as 'the most divine creature', although she was insecure about her looks. Born Greta Gustafsson, her beloved father was an itinerant labourer who died when she was a teenager and she grew up in poverty in a Stockholm slum. After getting a scholarship to the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm, she was cast in 1924 in the silent epic The Saga of Gösta Berling, whose director, Mauritz Stiller, gave her the name Garbo and got her a Hollywood contract. She went on to make classic films including Mata Hari, Queen Christina, Anna Karenina and Ninotchka. She had gone to Hollywood wanting to send money back home to her mother and sister, whose early death from cancer was to devastate her. Disillusioned with the film industry, she suddenly announced she was retiring in 1941, aged 35. She never acted again. She withdrew from public life, relying on close and protective friends, including her long-term lover, George Schlee, and the comic actor and film-maker Charlie Chaplin. When she was awarded an honorary Oscar in 1955, she did not attend the ceremony. She died in 1990. Sign up to Film Weekly Take a front seat at the cinema with our weekly email filled with all the latest news and all the movie action that matters after newsletter promotion Tucker said Garbo became wary of people selling stories about her: 'She had to become very private and trust her instincts of who she let in, and that came across as frosty. But also it's about how the press weave a narrative. They take a picture of her looking sad or covering her face and say, 'She's hiding, this woman who never goes out.' She did go out. She partied all the time, but just at friends' houses. She was having a wild time, but in private. '[The press] create a narrative and then, sadly, that becomes the narrative … [They were] offering so much money to … her poorer friends to tell stories, so then they ended up getting cut out of her life and, just before she died, she was pretty much alone because she couldn't trust anyone.' Reisfield only recently had the letters translated and he is drawing on them for his forthcoming book, Greta Garbo and The Rise of the Modern Woman. Mostly dating from the 1940s and 1950s, Garbo had sent the letters to his grandmother, Peggy, a former nurse who married Garbo's brother, Sven Gustafson. They reflect Garbo's bid for privacy. In one letter, she wrote from Wisconsin: 'Nobody recognises me here.' In another, planning to visit Palm Springs in California, she advised: 'If you would like to write to me … write in Swedish, because they might open the envelope.' The documentary is produced by Embankment, an independent film company whose productions include The Father, the Oscar-winning drama starring Anthony Hopkins. It airs on 14 May on Sky Arts, Freeview and the streaming service Now.
Time of India
22-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Time of India
Garbo: Where Did You Go? OTT Release Date - When and where to watch documentary based on Greta Garbo's life
Garbo: Where Did You Go? OTT Release Date - Netflix is ready to shine a spotlight on one of Hollywood's most iconic, yet mysterious stars with its new documentary, Garbo: Where Did You Go? Set to release on May 14, this 90-minute film explores the life, fame, and solitude of Greta Garbo, a name that continues to fascinate generations long after her exit from the screen. What is Garbo: Where Did You Go? all about? Directed by Lorna Tucker (Westwood: Punk Icon, Activist), the documentary promises an emotional and visually moving look at Greta Garbo's real story. Far beyond the glitz of Hollywood, this film digs into her private world using her own words, personal letters, and rare archival footage. It recreates parts of her life with stylised scenes, including Greta's reclusive time spent in her Manhattan apartment. Actress Noomi Rapace lends her voice to Garbo's own letters and thoughts. Who was Greta Garbo? Before her fame, Greta Garbo was a Swedish girl with big dreams. She went on to become one of the biggest movie stars of the 1920s and 1930s, starring in classics like Ninotchka, Camille, and Queen Christina. Known for her beauty, quiet charm, and expressive performances, Garbo became a symbol of old Hollywood glamour. But just as her fame reached its peak, she stepped away from it all. Unlike most stars, Garbo chose silence over fame. She rarely gave interviews, didn't sign autographs, and spent the second half of her life away from the public eye. Her mysterious nature only added to her legend. An honest and humane look at a complicated star Director Lorna Tucker brings a fresh, honest lens to Garbo's life. After the documentary's premiere at the Stockholm International Film Festival, Tucker shared, 'I don't want to say that I know who she was,' Tucker said, 'but I want people to see that these gods we create are terribly human, moany and depressed, and far from always knowing what they're doing.' Note: If you find Greta Garbo: Leave Me Alone written somewhere as the title, it is the same documentary as the one Netflix is about to premiere.
