Greta Garbo (Portrait Treatment) 2010

1. Garbo was born Greta Lovisa Gustafsson in Stockholm, Sweden on 18 September 1905. As a child, Garbo was daydreaming and shy. She hated school and did not play much, but was interested in theater from an early age and dreamt about becoming an actress. At the age of 13, Garbo graduated from school, and typical for a Swedish working-class girl at that time, did not pursue further education; she would later express an inferiority complex about this fact.

2. Except for the very early days of her career, Garbo was reclusive; she seldom signed autographs, rarely attended social functions, answered no fan mail, and she gave few interviews. Her refusal to give interviews gave rise to the press reporter jargon "pulling a Garbo" or "going Garbo" referring to any such actions. In her 1928 Photoplay interview she said, "I have always been moody. When I was just a little child, as early as I can remember, I have wanted to be alone. I detest crowds, don’t like many people. I used to crawl into a corner and sit and think, think things over."

3. Garbo was introduced to stage and screen actress Lilyan Tashman at a tennis party in 1927 and allegedly had an affair with her. The two became inseparable companions who went shopping, swimming, and to Tashman's garden cottage. There was some speculation that Garbo was bisexual, that she had intimate relationships with women as well as with such men as John Gilbert. She and Gilbert starred together for the first time in the classic Flesh and the Devil (1926). Their on-screen erotic intensity soon translated into an off-camera romance, and by the end of production Garbo had moved in with Gilbert. Gilbert allegedly proposed to her three times before she accepted. When a marriage was finally arranged in 1926, she failed to show up at the ceremony.

4. Garbo continued to demonstrate great loyalty to John Gilbert and insisted that he appear with her in 1933's Queen Christina, despite the objection of MGM studio head Louis B. Mayer; Laurence Olivier had originally been chosen for the role. In 1935, David O. Selznick wanted to cast her as the dying heiress in Dark Victory, but she insisted on doing Tolstoy's Anna Karenina instead. Although Anna Karenina was arguably one of her most famous roles, Garbo regarded her role as the doomed courtesan in George Cukor's Camille (1936), opposite Robert Taylor, as her finest performance.

5. Garbo gradually withdrew from the entertainment world and moved to a secluded life in New York City, refusing to make any public appearances. She is often associated with her famous line, a line the American Film Institute in 2005 voted the 30th most memorable movie quote of all time, as the Russian ballerina Grusinskaya in Grand Hotel (1932): "I want to be alone (...) I just want to be alone." a theme echoed in several of her other roles, e.g. in The Single Standard (1929) where her character Arden Stuart 'spoke' the line: "I am walking alone because I want to be alone" and in Love (1927) where a title card read "I like to be alone". By the early 1930s the phrase was indelibly linked with Garbo's persona, but Garbo later commented: "I never said, 'I want to be alone.' I only said, 'I want to be let alone.' There is all the difference." Garbo lived the last years of her life in relative seclusion. On 15 April 1990, aged 84, she died in New York Hospital as a result of pneumonia and renal failure. Garbo neither married nor had children.