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.