12-05-2025
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
