Remembering Greta Garbo

Greta Garbo (born Greta Lovisa Gustafsson) was a Swedish-born American film actress and an international icon during the 1920s and 1930s.

Garbo launched her career with a secondary role in the 1924 Swedish film The Saga of Gosta 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 immediately stirred interest with her first silent film, Torrent, released in 1926. A year later, her performance in Flesh and the Devil made her an international star.

Garbo's first talking film was Anna Christie (1930). MGM marketers enticed the public with the catch-phrase "Garbo talks!" Her success continued in films such as Mata Hari (1931) and Grand Hotel (1932). Many critics and film historians consider her performance as the doomed courtesan Marguerite Gautier in Camille (1936) to be her finest. Her turn in the comedy Ninotchka (1939),  earned her a third Academy Award nomination, but after the failure of Two-Faced Woman (1941), she retired from the screen, at the age of 35, after acting in twenty-eight films.

From then on, Garbo declined all opportunities to return to the screen. Shunning publicity, she began a private life, and neither married nor had children.

Garbo received an honorary Academy Award in 1954 for her "luminous and unforgettable screen performances."

Greta Garbo died on 15 April 1990, aged 84, in the hospital, as a result of pneumonia and renal failure.

In 1999, the American Film Institute ranked Garbo fifth on their list of the greatest female stars of Classic Hollywood Cinema, after Katharine Hepburn, Bette Davis, Audrey Hepburn, and Ingrid Bergman.