#about greta garbo

[divinegarbo]

Greta Garbo had something that nobody ever had on the screen. Nobody. I don’t know whether she even knew she had it, but she did. … 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.

Clarence Brown 

[divinegarbo]

– First Chapter in the Life of the Screen's Most popular Star – As Told By her to Ruth Biery

It was Saturday evening, New Year’s eve, 1927. Greta Garbo sat at a tiny table in a tiny tea room in Santa Monica, California. She had just thrown from her shoulders a gray wollycoat “such as we wear in Sweden“ and was looking wistfully out of the window as though to penetrate the dark secrets beyond them.

[divinegarbo]

Marvelous, alluring... capricious… fascinating woman… One day she is childlike, naive, ingenuous, a girl of ten… The next she is a mysterious woman a thousand years old, knowing everything.

John Gilbert about Greta Garbo

[divinegarbo]

I’m convinced she was never bored. What she enjoyed most was being alone with her own thoughts and inner dialogues. She had no other greater ambition because she’d achieved them all by the time she was thirty-five—she was the most famous, beautiful, and accomplished woman of her time. But she paid the price by losing her privacy, which was the one thing she wanted—just to lead a decent, healthy, honest life out of the public eye. It wasn’t Two-Faced Woman that made her quit movies. It was about personal development. From the age of seventeen, she’d done nothing but work, and her huge success came before she’d had time to develop an emotional life. In the end, her emotional life was more important.

Sam Green, companion of Garbo’s