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Greta Garbo c. 1952

"I'll never forget the hushed atmosphere on the stage during her presence. We spoke in whispers, and moved about on tiptoe. Not by order, but because, almost subconsciously, every one of us was affected by a strange reverence for this unearthly woman, so close to us, and yet so remote and untouchable. She never spoke to anyone on the set except Mamoulian— not even to Gilbert. Gilbert, it was said, had wept from joy when the studio gave him the part after an all-night huddle, thus reuniting him with Garbo for the first time in five years. He was very nervous on the set during the first few days, so much so, in fact, that he was unfit for work. He missed his cues, forgot his lines, and we had to do the same scene over and over again, sometimes as often as 20 times, before Mamoulian was satisfied. Garbo, on the other hand, always knew her lines perfectly and never interrupted a scene and required a re-take. She spoke her lines without any foreign accent, in that wonderfully modulated and penetrating voice of hers, and so faultless was her stage diction that it seemed impossible she hadn’t spoken English all her life."

-Movie Classic magazine, Feb. 1937, an article by Leon Surmelian who played in Queen Christina one of the Spanish officers

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Greta Garbo in Camille (1936)

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Greta Garbo

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Camille (George Cukor, 1936).

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Greta Garbo by Louise Ruth Harriet, june 1929

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‘One day Mrs. Lubitsch called me to say she was giving a “black-tie party” in honor of a visiting German film star. Forty “prominent” people were invited. The film star’s husband was a German producer Berthold had known in Berlin, and out of nostalgia he said we should accept. As was common in Hollywood, beautiful women were clustered in one corner of the room, while the men talked shop in the other. Jacques Feyder remained of course with the ladies; Françoise was not there as she had gone to Paris for a few weeks. He greeted me and led me to a couch, on which, next to the German star, whose billowing skirt was taking practically all the space, sat Greta Garbo. She was the only woman who wore an austere black suit and not evening dress. As the German star refused to subdue her flounces, there was no room for me on the couch, and we went out to the veranda, leaving her enthroned in her splendor. The night was chilly. Only a few hardy characters were sitting outside. Feyder secured a bottle of champagne and the three of us spent the rest of the evening in a highly animated mood.’ (Salka Viertel in her autobiography “The Kindness of Strangers”) Garbo & Dietrich in The Meeting of Two Queens (1991) directed by Cecilia Barriga