Greta Garbo (born Greta Lovisa Gustafsson; 18 September 1905 – 15 April 1990) was a Swedish and American film actress. She was a leading star during Hollywood's silent and early golden eras. Regarded as one of the greatest screen actresses of all time, she is known for her melancholic and somber screen persona, her film portrayals of tragic characters, and her subtle and understated performances. In 1999, the American Film Institute ranked Garbo fifth on its list of the greatest female stars of classic Hollywood cinema.
Garbo launched her career with a supporting role in the 1924 Swedish film The Saga of Gösta Berling. Her performance caught the attention of Louis B. Mayer, chief executive of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), who brought her to Hollywood in 1925. She stirred interest with her first American silent film, Torrent (1926). Garbo's performance in Flesh and the Devil (1926), her third movie in the United States, made her an international star. In 1928, Garbo starred in A Woman of Affairs, which catapulted her to MGM's highest box-office star, surpassing the long-reigning Lillian Gish. Other well-known Garbo films from the silent era are The Mysterious Lady (1928), The Single Standard (1929), and The Kiss (1929).
With Garbo's first sound film, Anna Christie (1930), MGM marketers enticed the public with the tagline "Garbo talks!" That same year she starred in Romance and for her performances in both films she received her first combined nomination out of three nominations for the Academy Award for Best Actress. By 1932, her success allowed her to dictate the terms of her contracts and she became increasingly selective about her roles. She continued in films such as Mata Hari (1931), Susan Lenox (Her Fall and Rise) (1931), Grand Hotel (1932), Queen Christina (1933), and Anna Karenina (1935).
Many critics and film historians consider her performance as the doomed courtesan Marguerite Gautier in Camille (1936) to be her finest and the role gained her a third Academy Award nomination. However, Garbo's career eventually declined and she became one of many stars labelled box office poison in 1938. Her career revived with a turn to comedy in Ninotchka (1939), which earned her a fourth Academy Award nomination. Two-Faced Woman (1941), which received poor reviews, was the last of her 28 feature films. Following this commercial failure, she continued to be offered movie roles, though she declined most of them. Those she did accept failed to materialize, either due to lack of funds or because she dropped out during filming. In 1954, Garbo was awarded an Academy Honorary Award "for her luminous and unforgettable screen performances".
Over time, Garbo would decline all opportunities to return to the screen. In her retirement, she shunned publicity, led a private life, and became an art collector whose paintings included works by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Pierre Bonnard and Kees van Dongen. Although she refused throughout her life to talk to friends about her reasons for retiring, four years before her death, she told Swedish biographer Sven Broman: "I was tired of Hollywood. I did not like my work. There were many days when I had to force myself to go to the studio ... I really wanted to live another life."
Greta Lovisa Gustafsson was born in Södermalm, Stockholm, Sweden at 7:30 p.m. She was the third, and youngest, child of Anna Lovisa (née Karlsson, 1872–1944), who worked at a jam factory, and Karl Alfred Gustafsson (1871–1920), a laborer. She had an older brother, Sven Alfred (1898–1967), and an older sister, Alva Maria (1903–1926). Garbo was nicknamed Kata, which was how she had mispronounced her first name, for the first ten years of her life.
Her parents met in Stockholm, where her father had been visiting from Frinnaryd. He moved to Stockholm to become independent and worked as a street cleaner, grocer, factory worker and butcher's assistant. He married Anna, who moved from Högsby. The family was impoverished and lived in a three-bedroom cold-water flat at Blekingegatan No. 32. They raised their three children in a working-class district regarded as the city's slum. Garbo later recalled:
It was eternally grey—those long winter's nights. My father would be sitting in a corner, scribbling figures on a newspaper. On the other side of the room, my mother is repairing ragged old clothes, sighing. We children would be talking in very low voices, or just sitting silently. We were filled with anxiety, as if there were danger in the air. Such evenings are unforgettable for a sensitive girl, but also for a girl like me. Where we lived, all the houses and apartments looked alike, their ugliness matched by everything surrounding us.
Garbo was a shy daydreamer as a child. She disliked school and preferred to play alone. She was a natural leader who became interested in theatre at an early age. She directed her friends in make-believe games and performances, and dreamed of becoming an actress. Later, she would participate in amateur theatre with her friends and frequent the Mosebacke Theatre. At the age of 13, Garbo graduated from school, and, typical of a Swedish working-class girl at that time, she did not attend high school. She later acknowledged a resulting inferiority complex.
The Spanish flu spread throughout Stockholm in the winter of 1919 and her father, to whom she was very close, became ill and lost his job. Garbo cared for him, taking him to the hospital for weekly treatments. He died in 1920 when she was 14 years old.
Garbo first worked as a soap-lather girl in a barber shop before taking a job in the PUB department store where she ran errands and worked in the millinery department. After modeling hats for the store's catalogues, Garbo earned a more lucrative job as a fashion model at Nordiska Kompaniet. In 1920, a director of film commercials for the store cast Garbo in roles advertising women's clothing. Her first commercial premiered on 12 December 1920. In 1922, Garbo caught the attention of director Erik A. Petschler, who gave her a part, credited as Greta Gustafson, in his short comedy Peter the Tramp, released as Luffar-Petter.From 1922 to 1924, she studied at the Royal Dramatic Training Academy in Stockholm. She was recruited in 1924 by the Finnish director Mauritz Stiller to play a principal part in his film The Saga of Gösta Berling, a dramatization of the famous novel by Nobel Prize winner Selma Lagerlöf, which also featured the actor Lars Hanson. Stiller became her mentor, training her as a film actress and managing all aspects of her nascent career. She followed her role in Gösta Berling with a starring role in the German film Die freudlose Gasse (Joyless Street or The Street of Sorrow, 1925), directed by G. W. Pabst and co-starring Asta Nielsen. She praised Asta and said: "In terms of expression and versatility, I am nothing to her."
Accounts differ on the circumstances of her first contract with Louis B. Mayer, at that time vice president and general manager of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Victor Seastrom, a respected Swedish director at MGM, was a friend of Stiller and encouraged Mayer to meet him on a trip to Berlin. There are two recent versions of what happened next. In one, Mayer, always looking for new talent, had done his research and was interested in Stiller. He made an offer, but Stiller demanded that Garbo be part of any contract, convinced that she would be an asset to his career. Mayer balked, but eventually agreed to a private viewing of Gösta Berling. He was immediately struck by Garbo's magnetism and became more interested in her than in Stiller. "It was her eyes," his daughter recalled him saying, "I can make a star out of her." In the second version, Mayer had already seen Gösta Berling before his Berlin trip, and Garbo, not Stiller, was his primary interest. On the way to the screening, Mayer said to his daughter: "This director is wonderful, but what we really ought to look at is the girl ... The girl, look at the girl!" After the screening, his daughter reported, he was unwavering: "I'll take her without him. I'll take her with him. Number one is the girl."