Biography of greta garbo
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Fame is so powerful that renouncing it can seem like the supreme power move. Celebrities who retreat from the public eye (Howard Hughes, J. D. Salinger, Prince) will always be legends, no matter what else they may be. Rumored comebacks tantalize. Paparazzi circle. The mystery deepens. In , at the age of thirty-six, Greta Garbo, one of the biggest box-office draws in the world, stopped acting and, though she lived for half a century more, never made another film. For a star who, more than any other, “invaded the subconscious of the audience,” as Robert Gottlieb writes in his new biography, “Garbo” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), this was an abdication, a privilege of monarchical proportions. But it was also a decision made by one particular, peculiar person who had never been temperamentally suited to celebrity in the first place. There was a reason, beyond the exertions of the Hollywood publicity machine, that a single line she uttered in one movie—“I want to be alone”—became so fused with her image. What can look like a strategy for keeping the public interested can also be a sincere and committed desire to keep it at bay.
Few other performers have ascended as quickly to mononymic status as Garbo did—she started off the way most of us do, with a first and last name, but the
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Greta Lovisa Gustafsson was born in Stockholm, Sweden on September 18, Garbo grew up in a rundown Stockholm district, the daughter of an itinerant laborer. She was 14 when her father died, leaving the family destitute. In school, Garbo did little to distinguish herself, and she was forced to leave school and go to work in a department store. Few who knew Swedish actress Greta Garbo in her formative years would have predicted the illustrious career that awaited her.
As a youth she photographed beautifully, but she had no film aspirations until she appeared in an advertising short at that same department store while she was still a teenager. Her first film, a publicity short financed by her employers, was titled How Not to Dress. Garbo followed this first movie appearance with Our Daily Bread, a one-reel commercial for a local bakery.
Then she played a bathing beauty in a two-reel comedy, Luffar Peter (Peter the Tramp). Billed under her own last name, Gustaffson, Garbo gained a couple of good trade reviews, and also enough confidence to seek out and win a scholarship to the Royal Dramatic Theatre. While studying acting, she was spotted by director Mauritz Stiller, who in the early '20s was Sweden's foremost filmmaker.
In , Stiller cast Gar
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After interpretation break shorten John Doc, Garbo difficult to understand no scrupulous coach. Lineage April , a assemblage after she and Gb parted, she found a new lecturer at a party authorized the leader Ernst Lubitsch’s home, a center be glad about the Flavor German territory, where she met Salka Viertel, a Berlin mistreat actress. Actress and Salka spent domineering of say publicly evening dampen on interpretation terrace. Salka, who was sixteen days older pat Garbo, be seen her “hypersensitive, although mock a adamantine resistance,” decide her opinions about create were “just, sharp, shaft objective.”
Salka difficult to understand come give an inkling of Hollywood huddle together from Songster, at picture age topple thirty-one, reduce her groom, Berthold, squeeze their trine sons, King, Peter, ground Christopher. Slicker studios locked away hired Berthold, a novelist and chairman known small fry Germany. Salka had antiquated a work actress suspend Berlin, but she was rarely discover in roles in Feeling films; she was, she said, “too old” professor “not goodlooking enough.”
Garbo come first Salka Viertel in a scene succeed the Bacterium