Posted by Jan den Breejen (62.100.38.42) on April 29, 2002 at 02:29:31:
Greta Garbo (1905-1990)
‘I want to be left alone’
Greta Garbo
The ‘ice queen’ (she was called ‘the sphinx’)and ‘home body’-archetype. She was very shy and kept herself to herself, especially from people that were not familiar to her.
"I would take a scene with Garbo....three or four times. It was pretty good, but I was never satisfied. When I saw that same scene on the screen, however, it had something that it just didn't have on the set. Garbo had something behind the eyes that you couldn't see until you photographed it in close-up. You could see thought. If she had to look at one person with jealousy, and another with love, she didn't have to change her expression. you could see it in her eyes as she looked from one to the other. And nobody else has been able to do that on the screen. Garbo did it without the command of the English language. For me, Garbo starts where they all leave off. She was a shy person; her lack of English gave her a slight inferiority complex....The sight of an electrician or carpenter watching her act would put her off balance....She didn't act for anybody but the camera. [Later,] I saw her in Switzerland and she was just the same: the life of the party if she knew you, but let one stranger enter the room and she goes and sits in the corner."
Clarence Brown (film director), c. 1966. Cited by Barry PARIS, 1995, Garbo: a Biography. London : Sidgwick & Jackson.
She seems to have constructed a mythical facade over the years; a mask to protect her from criticism and intrusion.
She never felt at home in the big city New York; ever looking melancholic and not happy. In her later years her circle of friends got smaller and smaller; until she ended up as a recluse. Sex was problematic for her ‘Come on; go on with it’ she had said to one of her lovers. Yet she was a sensitive and subtle person. Making movies seemned to be essentially contrary to her nature, people who knew her said it probably must have felt like torture to her. She never felt well in her skin, it felt to her that there were very few people she could communicate with and never feeling she could ‘let go’; it allways looked as if ‘the brakes were on’. She felt bitter and disappointed by humanity in her later years, when her skin and body got older it was horror to her. Perhaps underlying the sphinx mask there was a woman who felt very insecure, inferior and/or ugly and needed the safety of a public mask to survive her overtly sensitive character.
Assessment: Sensitive Style (Oldham), Avoidant Personality (Millon)
Perhaps Idiosyncratic style could be a better choice?, she was eccentric; at some time she only wanted to talk with money-people about funding her movie when she was in the dark so that nobody could see her.
Jan
Unable to ingratiate himself with MGM, Stiller left to work with Paramount. He made two pictures which featured Pola Negri, and they were again over-budget, he again had difficulty adjusting to the American style of filmmaking, and they both flopped. It was end of Stiller's career in Hollywood. In late 1927, with tears and Garbo's pleas for him to stay, Stiller went back to Sweden. Garbo would never see him again.
About a year later, Stiller died of cancer. Garbo received the telegram while on the set of Wild Orchids and collapsed. Garbo had cynicism towards her fellow actors and technicians, who were sympathetic to her distress. She felt they were insincere and wanted only to get on with the picture. This attitude towards others was a characteristic of Garbo, and it is especially one which people disliked.
Garbo grew more withdrawn throughout her post-Hollywood years, and continually shrank her circle of friends. She was never extremely reclusive and daily walked the streets of New York to window shop, and made it routine. She rarely gave interviews, and only then they were brief and her shyness towards the public was more apparent than ever before. She never appeared on television or radio.
Garbo died alone in 1990. With few friends and no family to speak of, she lived her remaining years as she wished. She was bitter about growing old, and carefully watched the wrinkles take over her once pure skin. Garbo felt unhappy during the latter years, in that she became less and less recognisable in public when walking the streets of New York. Garbo was thrifty when it came to shopping. Even at her height of wealth, she bargained with the shopkeepers over the prices of items, even down to the most modest pair of shoes. She became more religious as the years passed as well. She was very much interested in mysticism at one point, but eventually became annoyed with soothsayers and fortune tellers, and turned toward a more conventional deistic philosophy