Actors - Greta Garbo

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	Actors - Greta Garbo

Greta Garbo (September 18, 1905 – April 15, 1990) was a Swedish actress.

She was born Greta Lovisa Gustafsson (some sources cite her original surname as Gustafson or Gustaffson) () in Stockholm, Sweden, the youngest of three children born to Karl Alfred Gustafsson (1871 -1920) and Anna Lovisa Johansson (1872 - 1944). Her older sister and brother were Alva and Sven.

Becoming an actress

When Greta was 14, her father, to whom she was extremely close, died, and her relationship with her mother was, at best, strained. Consequently, she was forced to leave school and go to work. Her first job was as a lather girl in a barbershop.

She then became a clerk in the department store PUB in Stockholm, where she would also model for newspaper advertisements. Her first motion picture aspirations came when she appeared in a group of advertising short films for the department store where she worked, eventually seen by comedy director Eric Petscher.

He cast her in a bit part for his upcoming film Peter The Tramp (1922) (although her major motion picture debut was a year earlier in a low-budget film).

From 1922 to 1924, she studied at the prestigious Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm. While she was there, she met director Mauritz Stiller. He trained her in cinema acting technique and cast her in a major role in Gösta Berlings Saga (1924) (English: The Story of Gösta Berling) opposite Swedish film actor Lars Hanson. He also gave her the stage name Greta Garbo.

She starred in two movies in Sweden and one in Germany (Die Freudlose Gasse -- The Joyless Street -- also notable for a brief appearance by Marlene Dietrich in a food line).

When Stiller went to the United States in 1925 to work for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, he insisted that Garbo be given a contract as well. But their relationship came to an end as her fame grew. He was fired by MGM and returned to Sweden in 1928, where he died soon after.

Throughout this period, Garbo was slowly emerging as a Galatea molded by a series of corporate Pygmalions. In photographs and films one can see her change from a pudgy shopgirl, through various metamorphoses as she enters the studio machinery, until she turns into the perfect Sphinx, the "face" captured in famous pictures by Steichen and Clarence Bull and other photographers of the period.

Life in Hollywood

The most important of Garbo's silent movies were The Torrent (1926), Flesh and the Devil (1927) and Love (1927). She starred in the latter two with the popular leading man John Gilbert.

Her name was linked with his in a much publicized romance, and she was said to have left him standing at the altar when she changed her mind about getting married. The actress reportedly had several lesbian or bisexual lovers, including Louise Brooks and the writer/socialite Mercedes de Acosta.

She also had an on-and-off affair with the primarily homosexual British photographer Cecil Beaton, to whom she was briefly engaged, and who writes about his somewhat requited passion for her in his published diaries.

Having achieved enormous success as a silent movie star, she was one of the few who made the transition to talkies. She delayed as long as possible, and the studio worried endlessly about whether the world was ready for a talking Swedish Sphinx.

Her low, husky voice with Swedish accent was heard on screen for the first time in Eugene O'Neill's Anna Christie
(1930), which was publicized with the slogan "Garbo Talks". The movie was a huge success, but Garbo personally hated her performance.

Unfortunately, her one-time fiancé, John Gilbert, whose popularity was waning, did not fare as well after the advent of sound, due to the high pitch and thinness of his voice, and his career faltered. His last appearance with Garbo, in Queen Christina, was not as bad as some critics have suggested: he suffered from the problem all of Garbo's leading men suffered, which was that she was inevitably stronger and more powerful than they were.

Gilbert, John Barrymore, Fredric March, Robert Taylor and others ended up like feeble drones worshipping before the queen bee. Clark Gable was more than a match for Garbo, but she made only one early film with him, Susan Lenox: Her Rise and Fall.

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Actors - Greta Garbo

Becoming an actress

Life in Hollywood

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