At the age of 20, she landed in Hollywood, and very soon she became one of the most suggestive faces in the history of cinema.
Greta Lovisa Gustafsson had just turned 20 when she first came to Hollywood. Until then, the actress, born in Stockholm on September 18, 1905, had only made five silent films. In one of them, she had met Marlene Dietrich, with whom she had a fleeting romance.
Her face, with its perfect lines, would make Roland Barthes say: "She represents that unstable moment in which cinema extracts existential beauty from an essential beauty." Fascinated by that face of hers, Metro Goldwin Mayer hired her for a weekly salary of $350. There was one drawback, she was completely ignorant of the English language.
They discovered another stumbling block: she was not an easy person to deal with personally. Her first role in an American film was in Entre Naranjos, based on a novel by Spanish Vicente Blasco Ibáñez and in which she played Greta as a peasant.
From the first moment, the camera seemed in love with her, in all her shots her beauty and her irresistible magnetism stood out. Her most important support was given by John Gilbert, with whom she would act for the first time in 1926, in addition to maintaining a romance that gave abundant material to the press due to countless fights followed by countless reconciliations.
Gilbert, at the age of 28, was one of the first leading men in American cinema and earned $10,000 a week, while Greta only received $600, according to her contract. From there arose in 1926 the famous Greta strike, who asked for $5,000 a week, she refused to negotiate another figure and was suspended from the study for seven months. For that crisis, she had Gilbert's support, and then he introduced her to Harry Eddington, a skillful representative who got her a new contract for those 5,000 dollars a week, effective from June 1927, valid for five years.
He also advised him to use the single name "Garbo" from then on and suggested a new reticent behavior towards the press.
Garbo adopted this suggestion at face value, endorsed by a surly character whose surliness was frequently manifested. She locked up her private life, she shied away from all social commitment, she ran away in a bad mood from autograph hunters, and she secluded herself in invulnerable silence until she became the Great Sphinx. They called her “the woman who doesn't laugh”. She only knew one laugh of hers: the one she suddenly let out in Ninotchka. But it was a performance.
In 1928, after three years of absence, she returned to Sweden. She was besieged by crowds, journalists, and photographers. She said it was a way to "pay off a sentimental debt." She came back rich and famous. Being a legend of torrid and withering romances, she hadn't twisted her will to remain single.
The Uruguayan critic Homero Alsina Thevenet said: "At that moment, the crisis of the talkies, which destroyed other careers (Emil Jannings, Gilbert, Pola Negri) and threatened his, partly because his magnetism from the screen depended greatly on being a fabulous unreal image, which could not descend to a prosaic dialogue”.
It took MGM two years to award Garbo a talkie and shrewdly cast Eugene O'Neill's Anna Christie for that debut (in which it was just fine to have a Swedish accent), and it was hugely successful, following a release headlined by the phrase “Garbo speaks”. As her contract expired in 1932, the company made the most of her and made six films with her in just two years.
In Hollywood, she filmed 24 movies. Her first Best Actress Oscar nomination was for her performance in Anna Christie. She would be nominated three more times. In 1954 she was awarded an honorary Oscar, but she did not go to collect it. Her retirement from her cinema at age 36, at the height of her popularity, only fueled the legend.
In 1999, the American Film Institute named her the fifth greatest female star in Hollywood history. Nothing about her distracted her from her solitude or took her out of that luxurious confinement in her New York apartment, surrounded by paintings by Renoir, Bonnard, and Kandinsky.
The last interview she had with him was perhaps the shortest in the history of journalism. When the reporter began by saying: “I wonder…”, she interrupted him with a slow wave of her hand and said: “Why to wonder?” That was it.
