Latest news with #GretaGarbo
Times
12-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Times
The truth about my great-aunt Greta Garbo — and why she stopped making films
Scott Reisfield knew her as Kata, the playful Swedish great-aunt who taught him how to cartwheel and let him wage war between his plastic figures and her hand-carved wooden trolls. Later he learnt that she was an actress, but it was not until he was at college that he realised she had once been perhaps the most famous woman in the world. Greta Garbo, the subject of a captivating Sky TV documentary, Garbo: Where Did You Go?, was one of the best-paid performers in Hollywood for much of the Twenties and Thirties — and probably the most worshipped. In 1930 she received 3,000 letters a day, compared with 800 sent to the American president Herbert Hoover. Yet, says Reisfield, an erudite contributor to Lorna
Telegraph
10-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
The strange story of the visionary director trapped in Goebbels's fist
Halfway through The Director, Daniel Kehlmann's engrossing and terrifying seventh novel, its protagonist meets a powerful politician, a Minister of the Reich. This man has a Rhenish accent and a slight limp on his right side. 'Delighted, delighted, delighted!' the Minister says on meeting his guest, until, when the supplicant rejects one of the Minister's suggestions, the latter changes his tack. ''Wrong answer,' said the Minister. 'Wrong answer, wrong answer, wrong answer, wrong answer, wrong answer.'' The lack of exclamation mark reveals which statement is serious and which is not. The unrelenting repetition is ruthless and shocking. The Director delivers such shocks with similar ruthlessness but far more subtlety. Kehlmann proves his mastery of the historical form in reconceiving the life of GW Pabst, the Austrian director who was the contemporary and compatriot of Fritz Lang – whose visionary Metropolis (1927) remains as visionary as the day it was made. Pabst's name has mostly passed into obscurity; it's the names of the women whose early careers he furthered, among them Louise Brooks, Leni Riefenstahl and Greta Garbo, whose reputations have endured. The real Pabst made films – not as successfully as he would wish – in France before the Second World War. Kehlmann takes effective liberties with his story by getting him to Hollywood, that place garlanded with alien palms. But it's true that Pabst returned to Austria (renamed Ostmark) during the war. Here, extraordinarily, he and his wife Trude cross the border back into the Fatherland just as his compatriots are escaping. Yes, his mother is ill and needs to be cared for; but yes, a charming Nazi agent persuades him that back in the Reich he will have all the money he needs to make the films he wants, all the staff, all the freedom. Yet the knowledge of how that meeting with Hitler's propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels is going to go – for, although he is never named, it is he in the scene described above – underscores, rather than undermines, the dread. Kehlmann's last novel, Tyll, was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2020. It was centred on another entertainer caught up in a destructive conflict: the Thirty Years' War of the 17th century. Tyll himself is based on a character from German folklore, a jester, a trickster. Both novels use shifting viewpoints to observe global events, and human responses to those events, with a wickedly observant eye, though where Tyll is a spark, Pabst is, in Kehlmann's depiction, eternally gloomy. Yet his inertia, which takes on a haunting, deeply surreal air, is frightening: we feel ourselves drawn into his paralysis and the paralysis of everyone around him, including his son, Jakob, who's inducted inexorably into the Hitler Youth. Over and again, Kehlmann's central characters observe themselves performing actions as if from a great distance – or indeed, as if in a film. Jakob, as a teenager, learns to be a bully, learns that violence in his new world brings dominion and success. 'When you can't do something, and at the same time have no choice but to do it, there's only one solution: have someone else do it. Someone who looks like you and who uses your body, but who has no difficulty shooting two bullets into the head of a small screaming deer.' Perhaps it is a deer, or perhaps it is not. As in Tyll, Kehlmann draws in elements of German mythtelling to deepen his tale. When Pabst and his family arrive at the family home near Salzburg, they are met at the station by the caretaker, Jerzabek, who rants about the Jews – 'The Führer was now driving out the vermin' – to his passengers in the carriage. If those passengers take issue with these sentiments or even reply, the author does not note it. But gradually Jerzabek develops into an ogre, his two monstrously tall and cruel daughters like trolls in a dreadful fable. Is Jerzabek real, or a figure of Pabst's imagination? The truth is somewhere in the middle: his sinister weirdness demonstrates how much the power of our own storytelling, for good or ill, compels us. Make peace with a monster, Kehlmann suggests, and the monster will appear in another form, right in your own house, opening a trap door to a cellar – and by then it's too late.
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
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.
Los Angeles Times
01-04-2025
- Los Angeles Times
9 excellent new and improved Palm Springs-area hotels for a dreamy getaway
For decades, one of Palm Springs' most recognizable focal points was an eyesore. A half-constructed hotel spanning 2½ centrally located city blocks sat stalled in limbo. Initially, an upscale Andaz property was in the works for a 2015 groundbreaking. The years ticked by with little to show until a new owner came in, and finally, in October, the Thompson Palm Springs opened its doors. As a Coachella Valley resident, I wondered about this project for so long that when I finally entered, it felt as if Willy Wonka had flung open the doors to his factory. Inside was a slick property filled with museum-grade art, hushed courtyards with bungalow-style rooms and a flashy rooftop pool adjoining one of the city's best new restaurants. The long-awaited Thompson Hotel, with 168 bungalow-inspired rooms, filled a void that had become an eyesore. Even more exciting: The Thompson is only one in a crop of hotels renewing interest in the Greater Palm Springs hospitality scene, along with major improvements at several other existing properties, in the past two years. Take, for example, the former gay men's clothing-optional resort in Palm Springs that sat empty for two years until new owners purchased the building and reopened it in January as Terra Palm Springs, a wellness resort with a luminous boho-meets-Bali aesthetic — and a revived clothing mandate. Further south, the historic La Quinta Resort, where Hollywood stars like Greta Garbo and Frank Capra once resided, underwent a top-to-bottom renovation this year, redoing the lobby, all guest rooms and some public areas, including a sleek new pool complex reserved for adults. Terra Palm Springs offers a Himalayan salt rock sauna, cold plunge, hot tub, pool and soothing rain room. For weary Angelenos in search of a desert respite, these new and improved properties represent the most alluring places to stay in the valley right now. They're also well positioned for guests to take advantage of the valley's scenic hiking, sumptuous spas, boozy brunches and nostalgic midcentury architecture. The nine selections listed here are where this local sends her visiting family and friends and range from boutique, atmospheric inns to full-service, family-friendly resorts. Visit this spring to experience the revived surroundings amid gorgeous weather, festivals and tournaments; or consider a summer visit when sizzling temps mean lower prices and fewer crowds. (Note: Some properties are advertised as adults only, but whether that's legal in California is hazy at best.)
