Greta Garbo (1905 – 1990)
Born Greta Lovisa Gustafsson, was a Swedish born actress and Hollywood icon.
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Garbo is lonely. She always has been and she always will be. She lives in the core of a vast aching aloneness. She is a great artist, but it is both her supreme glory and her supreme tragedy that art is to her the only reality. The figures of living men and women, the events of everyday existence, move about her, shadowy, unsubstantial. It is only when she breathes the breath of life into a part, clothes with her own flesh and blood the concept of a playwright, that she herself is fully awake, fully alive.
Her instinct, her mastery over the machine, was pure witchcraft. I cannot analyze this woman's acting. I only know that no one else so effectively worked in front of a camera.
She is the most miraculous blend of personality and sheer dramatic talent that the screen has ever known and her presence in The Painted Veil immediately makes it one of the season's cinema events.
Except physically, we know little more about Garbo than we know about Shakespeare.
Garbo still belongs to that moment in cinema when capturing the human face still plunged audiences into the deepest ecstasy, when one literally lost oneself in a human image as one would in a philtre, when the face represented a kind of absolute state of the flesh, which could be neither reached nor renounced.
You're the purple light of a summer night in Spain. You're the National Gallery; you're Garbo's Salary; you're cellophane!
What, when drunk, one sees in other women, one sees in Garbo sober.
I never said, "I want to be alone." I only said, "I want to be let alone! There is all the difference.
The mystery surrounding Garbo was as thick as a London fog.
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