#by greta garbo

[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]

Let’s not talk of me!“ she pleaded. “It is New Year’s eve. In Sweden that means so much, so very much. There we go to church and eat and drink and see everybody we know. I have been blue all day. At home, in Stockholm, they are skiing and skating and throwing snowballs at one another. The cheeks are red – oh, please, let’s not talk of me."

"The Story of Greta Garbo - First Chapter in the Life of the Screen's Most Popular Star" (x) 

[divinegarbo]

I hated school. I hated the bonds they put on me. There were so many things outside. I liked history best. But I was afraid of the map – geography you call it.

Greta Garbo (x)

[divinegarbo]

“I am always nervous and restless when I am making a picture. I cannot help it. That is why I never want people to see me while I am acting. I do not let people on the set. And I stay by myself all I can while I am making a picture. I sit in one corner alone, or go to my dressing room, or I walk outside by myself while the others are working.

I cannot stand it for someone to come up and say, ‘What did you think of the football game?’ as they do here in America. I cannot get back on the track. I cannot do my best work then. It is the same with every picture – I tremble always, all over."

- Greta Garbo, quoted in 1928 Photoplay interview (reprinted in Photoplay: the aristocrat of motion picture magazines, Vol. 34) 

[divinegarbo]

I don’t like to talk to people, because I can’t express myself satisfactorily. I don’t say the things I mean.

Greta Garbo