Greta Garbo: 1905-1990: The Last Mysterious Lady:

To several generations of moviegoers, Greta Garbo was only the world’s most famous recluse. Wasn’t she the star who, in the 1932 film Grand Hotel, had murmured, “I want to be alone” and then played out that role for the rest of her life? What else could excite the old awe when she died last week, at 84, ) from complications of kidney disease? After all, Garbo stopped making movies when she was 36, nearly a half-century ago. She never won an Oscar. She worked with few good directors, made fewer great films than any star of comparable magnitude. She appeared in 14 silent features, then 14 talkies beginning in 1930 — but even in that era her fervid, hypnotic style of acting was an odd anachronism. Except in drag clubs, she inspired no real imitators. But Garbo was more than a camp goddess. She was just the most haunting beauty, and the finest actress, in movie history.

“What, when drunk, one sees in other women,” Kenneth Tynan wrote, “one sees in Garbo sober.” But it wasn’t the beauty alone that intoxicated. Garbo used her severe gorgeousness to suggest that the characters she played were creatures from a nobler, alien world, doomed to exile among the puny men and cramped conventions of earth. She was typecast as the siren who lures men to hell, only to get there first; but her pained dignity gave the lie to cliche. This Garbo lived by a standard too high for men to reach, so they grabbed what they could touch — her body. “How little you know of love,” she sighs in A Woman of Affairs, “my kind of love.” Her films, from Flesh and the Devil to The Mysterious Lady, from Anna Christie to Anna Karenina, were a master course in the varieties of that kind of love: desperate, consuming, exalted. They were also lessons in her kind of star acting. Cinema would never again see its like.

The Garbo charisma was a creation as mysterious in its genesis as in its impact. She was born Greta Gustafsson to a poor Stockholm family, and at first she gave little hint of her unique hold on the camera. In early publicity films she giggles and models dresses or gorges on a cream puff. There is no beauty here, no acting ability. What could Mauritz Stiller, the pioneer Swedish director, have seen in this plump teenager? Maybe the future of movies. He changed her name to Garbo, cast her as the young female lead in his The Story of Gosta Berling (1924), then brought her along to Hollywood. The rest of their story is too trite and tragic for even a Garbo vehicle. Stiller was fired from The Temptress, their only American film together. He went home and died two years later.

From then on, and despite headline-grabbing flirtations with John Gilbert and Leopold Stokowski, Garbo became in effect the indentured mistress of her movie studio, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. This most galvanizing of actresses was the most passive of stars. At MGM’s urging, the young Garbo slimmed down, had her teeth capped, adjusted her hairline. Her most enduring studio ally was her doting cinematographer, William Daniels. Garbo must have felt comfortable, surrounded by MGM’s middlebrow high gloss. She may not have cared that its gentility suffocated her films, so long as she could breathe her artistry into them.

And she did, in the most improbable of circumstances. She could be a convincing “older woman,” older than Eve, when barely out of her teens. She could find temporary haven in the spindly arms of any callow leading man MGM cast opposite her, or in the mature embrace of a Gilbert or John Barrymore. She could play vibrant love scenes with just a vase of flowers (A Woman of Affairs) or bedroom furniture (Queen Christina). She could suggest regal exhaustion with the minutest shift in posture, then fling an extravagant gesture at the movie audience, daring it to laugh. She could laugh at herself too, as in Ernst Lubitsch’s delicious Ninotchka (1939). When asked, “Do you want to be alone, Comrade?” she snaps back, “No!”

She was alone, in an acting empyrean, in George Cukor’s 1937 Camille. As the selfless courtesan Marguerite Gautier, Garbo transforms her face into a life- and-death mask, and Dumas’s melodrama into classical tragedy. Every calculated audacity — the hint of disintegration in the eyes, the dry little laugh exploding into a tubercular cough, the weight of a thoughtful passion that gives substance to every line of dialogue — testifies to Garbo’s acute, intuitive knowledge of screen acting, and it allows her to play Marguerite at high pitch and with perfect precision. At the end, as she dies reconciled with her lover, she is both a helpless child and a hoarse old woman, whispering pleas and forgiveness. No other actress could create such a performance, or get away with it.

In Two-Faced Woman, Garbo exits a cocktail party and says brightly, “I look forward to my return.” She never did return; this amiable 1941 comedy was her last film. For years she was reported to be mulling beguiling projects (on the lives of St. Teresa of Avila, Eleanora Duse, Dorian Gray) from eminent auteurs (Max Ophuls, Salvador Dali, Orson Welles). Eventually, the vacation became permanent, and Garbo’s only pictures were those snapped on the fly by avid paparazzi. Now the camera was not a lover but a predator. Still, her withdrawal was a good and gracious career move. By refusing to make a comeback film, or star on a nighttime soap, or do a dentures commercial, Garbo kept her image and achievement indelible. She became the discreet curator of her own museum. On the screen of that museum a divine woman is whiplashed by fate, and we, her late-show subjects, sit in awe at the spectacle.