Greta Garbo was born on September 18, 1905, she traveled to the United States to become a star and ended up revolutionizing the fashion and life of celebrities. Finally, "The divine" got fed up with fame and became a ghost of the New York landscape until the last of her days.
When Greta Garbo arrived in the United States, only one photographer covered her arrival. It was the first five years of the 20s and no one imagined the great star that that European woman would become. Until now, she was nothing more than the companion of Mauritz Stiller, the most prestigious director in Sweden in those years.
But in the decades that followed, Garbo became a film icon, and a fashion icon, and served as the foundation for all the great female stars to come. Her greatness was so great that she managed to survive the transition to sound. She until she became a ghost that walked the streets of New York until her last days.
Greta, who was born Greta Lovisa Gustafsson, came from a family with few resources. Originally from the Södermalm neighborhood, in Stockholm, Sweden, she showed a passion for theater since she was a child. Her mother, a farmer who worked as a domestic servant, had had to fend for the family after her husband, a cleaning worker, passed away.
To help with household expenses, Greta dropped out of school and went to work. First in a barbershop, where she worked at age fifteen, then in the most famous stores in Stockholm. There, someone noticed the beauty of that teenager and she soon went from being a salesperson to a model in the hat catalog.
According to film journalist Juan Tejero, Greta was part of some advertising spots for the same store after her first job as a model. Although she did not look particularly pretty in them, she was only 16 years old, and she already gave glimpses of the future that she expected. In 1922, she took her first step into the performing arts and became one of the leads in the Luffar-Petter comedy.
The success was not exorbitant, but it was enough for Greta to decide to apply for a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, where she studied theater. The filmmaker Mauritz Stiller, who after her would take her to the United States, noticed her talent there and orchestrated her debut on the big screen with the film The Saga of Gösta Berling.
Her debut had an excellent reception from critics and Greta soon became part of the closed circle of the seventh art in her native Stockholm. It was even during those years that she chose to change her name and substituted, with great influence from Stiller, the last name Gustafsson for Gabor, which finally ended up becoming "Garbo".
Although she held various jobs on the German scene, Garbo's career took off when Louis B. Mayer, the second "M" at MGM, offered Stiller a three-year contract. A deal that the filmmaker accepted only when Greta has also included in the package a contract of USD 400 a year - a figure that would later rise so high that the actress became the highest paid in the industry.
She left Europe in 1925. However, Greta herself did not work on American soil until the following year, when she participated in the film Torrent, where she played a Spanish peasant. According to Vanity Fair magazine, during the recording of this tape, she began a process of "Americanization".
“They fixed her teeth and her hair, made her lose weight and, of course, learn English. With her massive feet, the biggest complex of hers, they couldn't do anything but keep themselves from being on screen for too long,” the magazine reported.
Thanks to these radical changes, Greta became all the European women who had a place in Hollywood stories: “The make-up technique transformed a naive young woman into a passionate and tempting woman, her figure was slimmed down with the help of a regimen rigorous and his magnificent body, both languid and energetic, was highlighted with sophistication”, details Juan Tejero.
Parallel to the success of Torrent and a second film that Greta filmed, Stiller's career was in decline. The Swede had important differences with MGM and returned to his native country, where he would die a few years after a heart attack. However, another man entered Greta's life: the renowned actor and silent film star, John Gilbert.
Both worked on the 1926 hit film The Devil and the Flesh. And soon, the biggest star of the Metro at that time - an icon whose story would later inspire the multi-award-winning film The Artist - and the rising actress decided to unite their lives in a loving relationship.
The passion that existed between the two was so great that it managed to detach itself from the screen and they became a highly mediatic couple. Eventually, they announced that they would marry King Vidor and Eleanor Boardman in a double wedding, according to Vanity Fair. However, they never made it to the altar as planned, Greta not showing up for the ceremony and dumping John.
Even though Gilbert fulfilled all the whims and even built her a small cabin surrounded by Swedish pines and a waterfall so that she could feel at home, the truth is that the young woman in her twenties missed her people and their customs: every time she granted an interview with the press spoke out against what his life had become. She loved acting, but she hated show business.
There was an aura of sadness and nostalgia that surrounded her. A factor that would be extremely capitalizable for MGM, which began to advertise her as both a mysterious and beautiful actress. She is an exotic beauty exported from Europe, whose coldness would make her even more unattainable. She thus managed to petrify herself with two more films, Ana Karenina, in 1927, and the divine woman in 1928.
A couple of years later, Greta made the leap towards talkies, “Garbo speaks!” said the slogan of the advertising campaign that the production company orchestrated around the event. And she managed to win over audiences with a deep, raspy voice in the 1930 Anna Christie film, which also earned her an Oscar nomination.
Those were the years, according to the journalist Tejero, that Garbo had the greatest success in commercial terms: with films like Susan Lenox, Mata Hari, Como tú me deseas, and Gran Hotel, from which the immemorable line “I want to be alone! !”; “La Divina”, as she was already known then, was a resounding success.
These projects were followed by other equally successful ones. Among them, is the iconic 1936 tape Margarita Gautier. The same that, according to some critics, has the most beautiful and famous last shot in history. However, nothing lasts forever and the decline in the life of this diva was becoming more noticeable.
After Gilbert, Greta's list of lovers spanned the length and breadth of Hollywood. In it, the names of some actresses and figures of the time sounded, such as the writer Mercedes de Acosta. Also Marlene Dietrich, Louise Brooks, Katherine Hepburn, and ClaudettteClaudette Colbert, according to Vanity Fair.
She also had relationships with several men, especially with some who were recognized within the entertainment world as the photographer Cecil Beaton and the dietician Gaylord Hauser, to name a few. However, none of her lovers came to marry her.
By the late 1930s, the decline of her career was evident. Although she ventured into the comedy genre with the 1939 film Nanotchka, its failure was a clear signal for Greta to retire from the screens. In addition, with the outbreak of World War II, the stars had been delegated to entertainment activities that she refused to take.
The actress retired permanently in 1941, she was 36 years old. As character-accentuated as ever, she gave up on Hollywood entirely. "It was a mysterious sailing ship that disappeared over the horizon as soon as she saw that she couldn't handle everything," Katharine Hepburn once said. And he was right, Greta remained isolated until the last day.
She lived in a luxurious apartment in New York and also visited her native country and the French Riviera. She did not film a movie again, although proposals were not lacking. Silence accompanied “la Divina” who over time became part of the backdrop of the Big Apple and, like the phrase she pronounced, loneliness accompanied her until her death on April 15, 1990, at 84 years.
That day, Hollywood and the entire world said goodbye to one of the biggest stars she knew. She came in a stranger with thin features and clumsy movements and she left the face of the Earth one of the most beloved actresses of the century.
