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Greta Garbo Quotes

Greta Garbo was a Swedish-American film actress during the 1920s and 1930s. Garbo was nominated three times for the Academy Award for Best Actress and received an Academy Honorary Award in 1954 for her "luminous and unforgettable screen performances." 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.

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 , 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, her third movie, made her an international star.Garbo's first talking film was Anna Christie . MGM marketers enticed the public with the tagline "Garbo talks!" That same year she starred in Romance. For her performances in these films she received the first of three Academy Award nominations for Best Actress. . In 1932, her popularity allowed her to dictate the terms of her contract and she became increasingly selective about her roles. Her success continued in films such as Mata Hari and Grand Hotel . Many critics and film historians consider her performance as the doomed courtesan Marguerite Gautier in Camille to be her finest. The role gained her a second Academy Award nomination. Garbo's career soon declined, however, and she was one of the many stars labeled "Box Office Poison" in 1938. Her career revived upon her turn to comedy in Ninotchka , which earned her a third Academy Award nomination, but after the failure of Two-Faced Woman , 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 led a private life. Garbo also became an art collector in her later life; her collection, including works from painters such as Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Pierre Bonnard, and Kees van Dongen, was worth millions of dollars when she died.

✵ 18. September 1905 – 15. April 1990
Greta Garbo photo
Greta Garbo: 9   quotes 3   likes

Famous Greta Garbo Quotes

“I am bewildered by the thousands of strange people who write me letters. They do not know me. Why do they do that?”

Greta Garbo

Screen Secrets: Greta Garbo Breaks her Silence (1928)

“I never said, "I want to be alone." I only said, "I want to be let alone! There is all the difference.”

Greta Garbo

Quoted in John Bainbridge, Garbo (1955)
As the Russian ballerina Grusinskaya in Grand Hotel (1932), she had said "I want to be alone." These words had become associated with Garbo herself in the public imagination.

“I t'ank I go home.”

Greta Garbo

Allegedly said on a movie set, after a director had filmed repeated takes of Garbo jumping into icy cold water, and wanted to film yet another take. Reported Paul F. Boller, John George, They Never Said It: A Book of Fake Quotes, Misquotes, and Misleading Attributions (1990), p. 30-31.
Misattributed

“We knew each other. We talked. We passed each other going to the set of our own films. We were doing our jobs. We had great mutual respect.”

Greta Garbo

Lillian Gish

“Today this young woman -The Garbo as she is known - is the most glamorous figure in the whole world; there is no one with a more magnetic, romantic or exotic personality, there never has been a film star with so wide an appeal… Greta Garbo is Queen of Hollywood, her salary is fabulous, her word law. She has pointed features in a round face, her mouth is wide and knife-like. Her teeth are large and square and like evenly matched pearls; her eyes are pale, with lashes so long that when she lowers her lids they strike her cheeks; her complexion is of an unearthly whiteness and so delicate that she looks to have one layer of skin less than other people, and the suspicion of a frown is sooner perceptible.”

Greta Garbo

Cecil Beaton, Book of Beauty (1930)
Source: http://www.garboforever.com/Beatons_Book_of_Beauty.htm

“Garbo still belongs to that moment in cinema when capturing the human face still plunged audiences into the deepest ecstasy, when one literally lost oneself in a human image as one would in a philtre, when the face represented a kind of absolute state of the flesh, which could be neither reached nor renounced.”

Greta Garbo

Roland Barthes, "The Face of Garbo," Mythologies (1957), trans. Annette Lavers [Farrar, Straus, 1986, ISBN 0-374-52150-6], p. 56

“The mystery surrounding Garbo was as thick as a London fog.”

Greta Garbo

Tallulah Bankhead, Tallulah: My Autobiography (1952), ch. 9, p. 172: Duels with the Screen

“Except physically, we know little more about Garbo than we know about Shakespeare.”

Greta Garbo

Kenneth Tynan, "Greta Garbo," Sight and Sound (April 1954), republished in Profiles (1990), p. 80

“Garbo is lonely. She always has been and she always will be. She lives in the core of a vast aching aloneness. She is a great artist, but it is both her supreme glory and her supreme tragedy that art is to her the only reality. The figures of living men and women, the events of everyday existence, move about her, shadowy, unsubstantial. It is only when she breathes the breath of life into a part, clothes with her own flesh and blood the concept of a playwright, that she herself is fully awake, fully alive.”

Greta Garbo

Marie Dressler, My Own Story as Told to Mildred Harrington (1934)

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