Download or read book Greta Garbo written by Karen Swenson and published by Scribner. This book was released on 1997-09-16 with total page 680 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A Life Apart is the first comprehensive biography to fully capture Greta Garbo's hidden personal life as well as her role as a film icon from a female perspective. Brimming with rare photos and startling new information - based on unpublished personal letters and conversations with Garbo's closest friends, coworkers, and lifelong associates - A Life Apart dramatically deconstructs the myriad misconceptions surrounding her life. Intimate, compelling, and often harrowing, this is the true story of an extraordinary woman who lived two lives: one for the camera, the other intensely private and perpetually apart." "Swenson presents a fascinating account of the star's passionate, often tumultuous relationships with lovers and friends, including Mimi Pollak, John Gilbert, Horke Wachmeister, Salka Viertel, Mercedes de Acosta, Leopold Stokowski, Gayelord Hauser, Gilbert Roland, Erich Maria Remarque, Cecil Beaton, Aristotle Onassis, George Schlee, and Cecile de Rothschild." "Meticulously researched, A Life Apart also contains new insight into Garbo's life after Hollywood - from her oft-rumored efforts to aid the Allies during World War II to the failure of her comeback attempt and the birth of her alter ego, "Harriet Brown.""--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Download or read book The Life Story of Greta Garbo written by Mary Margaret McBride and published by . This book was released on 1932 with total page 58 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Garbo written by Robert Gottlieb and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2021-12-07 with total page 373 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice | One of Esquire's 125 best books about Hollywood Award-winning master critic Robert Gottlieb takes a singular and multifaceted look at the life of silver screen legend Greta Garbo, and the culture that worshiped her. “Wherever you look in the period between 1925 and 1941,” Robert Gottlieb writes in Garbo, “Greta Garbo is in people’s minds, hearts, and dreams.” Strikingly glamorous and famously inscrutable, she managed, in sixteen short years, to infiltrate the world’s subconscious; the end of her film career, when she was thirty-six, only made her more irresistible. Garbo appeared in just twenty-four Hollywood movies, yet her impact on the world—and that indescribable, transcendent presence she possessed—was rivaled only by Marilyn Monroe’s. She was looked on as a unique phenomenon, a sphinx, a myth, the most beautiful woman in the world, but in reality she was a Swedish peasant girl, uneducated, naïve, and always on her guard. When she arrived in Hollywood, aged nineteen, she spoke barely a word of English and was completely unprepared for the ferocious publicity that quickly adhered to her as, almost overnight, she became the world’s most famous actress. In Garbo, the acclaimed critic and editor Robert Gottlieb offers a vivid and thorough retelling of her life, beginning in the slums of Stockholm and proceeding through her years of struggling to elude the attention of the world—her desperate, futile striving to be “left alone.” He takes us through the films themselves, from M-G-M’s early presentation of her as a “vamp”—her overwhelming beauty drawing men to their doom, a formula she loathed—to the artistic heights of Camille and Ninotchka (“Garbo Laughs!”), by way of Anna Christie (“Garbo Talks!”), Mata Hari, and Grand Hotel. He examines her passive withdrawal from the movies, and the endless attempts to draw her back. And he sketches the life she led as a very wealthy woman in New York—“a hermit about town”—and the life she led in Europe among the Rothschilds and men like Onassis and Churchill. Her relationships with her famous co-star John Gilbert, with Cecil Beaton, with Leopold Stokowski, with Erich Maria Remarque, with George Schlee—were they consummated? Was she bisexual? Was she sexual at all? The whole world wanted to know—and still wants to know. In addition to offering his rich account of her life, Gottlieb, in what he calls “A Garbo Reader,” brings together a remarkable assembly of glimpses of Garbo from other people’s memoirs and interviews, ranging from Ingmar Bergman and Tallulah Bankhead to Roland Barthes; from literature (she turns up everywhere—in Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, in Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, and the letters of Marianne Moore and Alice B. Toklas); from countless songs and cartoons and articles of merchandise. Most extraordinary of all are the pictures—250 or so ravishing movie stills, formal portraits, and revealing snapshots—all reproduced here in superb duotone. She had no personal vanity, no interest in clothes and make-up, yet the story of Garbo is essentially the story of a face and the camera. Forty years after her career ended, she was still being tormented by unrelenting paparazzi wherever she went. Includes Black-and-White Photographs

Download or read book Greta Garbo written by David Bret and published by Biteback Publishing. This book was released on 2012-06-25 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the male-oriented studio system, Greta Garbo wielded a power no other actress has ever possessed, before or since. Be it producer, director, lover or journalist, Garbo called the shots, and when she decided that she was done with the whirlwind of life as Hollywood's darling she withdrew completely, leaving her public begging for an encore that never came. Though there have been numerous biographies of Garbo, this is the first to investigate fully the two so-called missing periods in the life of this most enigmatic of Hollywood stars: the first during the late 1920s, forcing MGM to employ a lookalike to conceal what was almost certainly a pregnancy; the second during World War II when Garbo was employed by British Intelligence to track down Nazi sympathisers. It also analyses in detail the original, uncensored copies of Garbo's films - with the exception of The Divine Woman, of which no complete print survives - and offers substantial evidence that John Gilbert was not, in fact, the great love of her life. Rather her true affections lay with the gay, Sapphic and Scandinavian members of her very intimate inner circle. Using previously unsourced material, along with anecdotes from friends and colleagues that have never before been published, David Bret paints a rounded portrait of Garbo's childhood in Sweden, her rise to stardom and her all-too-brief reign as queen of MGM. Hers is a truly remarkable story, recounted here with warmth, intensity and unique insight.

Download or read book Garbo written by Barry Paris and published by Alfred A. Knopf. This book was released on 1995 with total page 686 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Draws on letters, tape-recorded conversations, and interviews to discuss Garbo's life in Sweden, her retirement from film, and the paranoia that imprisoned her the last fifty years of her life.

Download or read book The Great Garbo written by Robert Payne and published by Cooper Square Press. This book was released on 2002-09-06 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This lavishly-illustrated tour through the film career of Greta Garbo (1905-1990) provides a biographical background of the star and an analysis of her very special mystique. Payne describes how Garbo's timeless beauty worked its magic in such films as Flesh and the Devil, Anna Christie, Mata Hari, Grand Hotel, Queen Christina, Camille, and Ninotchka. Remarkable photos show the transformation of working-class girl Greta Gustafsson into a Hollywood bit player, and later into an icon of cinema glamour.

Download or read book The Girls written by Diana McLellan and published by Booktrope Editions. This book was released on 2013 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Diana McLellan reveals the complex and intimate connections that roiled behind the public personae of Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, Tallulah Bankhead, and the women who loved them. Private correspondence, long-secret FBI files, and troves of unpublished documents reveal a chain of lesbian affairs that moved from the theater world of New York, through the heights of chic society, to embed itself in the power structure of the movie business. The Girls serves up a rich stew of film, politics, sexuality, psychology, and stardom.

Download or read book Greta Garbo The Swedish Sphinx written by ChatStick Team and published by ChatStick Team. This book was released on 2024-03-14 with total page 143 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 🌟 Unveiling the Enigma: Greta Garbo: The Swedish Sphinx 🌟 Dive deep into the shadows of Hollywood's golden era to uncover the life of its most enigmatic star, Greta Garbo, in this compelling biography brought to you by the ChatStick Team. From her humble beginnings in Stockholm to her ascent as the silver screen's most inscrutable icon, this book peels back the layers of Garbo's mystique to reveal the woman behind the legend. 🎬✨ Why You Can't Miss This Book: 🇸🇪 Swedish Roots: Explore Garbo's early life in Sweden, setting the stage for her unparalleled journey. 🎥 Hollywood's Enigma: Delve into the breakthrough roles and silent stares that defined Garbo's career and captivated the world. 💖 Off-Screen Mystique: Gain rare insights into Garbo's private world, her struggles, and her quest for solitude away from the glaring spotlight. 🏆 Enduring Legacy: Discover the lasting impact of Garbo's work on film, culture, and the hearts of millions around the globe. Greta Garbo: The Swedish Sphinx is not just a biography; it's an intimate expedition into the heart of a legend. Perfect for fans of classic cinema, history enthusiasts, and anyone intrigued by the mysteries of stardom. 📚 Add this masterpiece to your collection and let the legend of Greta Garbo inspire you. 🌌

Download or read book Ideal Beauty written by Lois W. Banner and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2023-09-15 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the silver screen’s greatest beauties, Greta Garbo was also one of its most profound enigmas. A star in both silent pictures and talkies, Garbo kept viewers riveted with understated performances that suggested deep melancholy and strong desires roiling just under the surface. And offscreen, the intensely private Garbo was perhaps even more mysterious and alluring, as her retirement from Hollywood at age thirty-six only fueled the public’s fascination. Ideal Beauty reveals the woman behind the mystique, a woman who overcame an impoverished childhood to become a student at the Swedish Royal Dramatic Academy, an actress in European films, and ultimately a Hollywood star. Chronicling her tough negotiations with Louis B. Mayer at MGM, it shows how Garbo carved out enough power in Hollywood to craft a distinctly new feminist screen presence in films like Queen Christina. Banner draws on over ten years of in-depth archival research in Sweden, Germany, France, and the United States to demonstrate how, away from the camera’s glare, Garbo’s life was even more intriguing. Ideal Beauty takes a fresh look at an icon who helped to define female beauty in the twentieth century and provides answers to much-debated questions about Garbo’s childhood, sexuality, career, illnesses and breakdowns, and spiritual awakening.

Download or read book Greta Garbo written by Richard Corliss and published by Jove Books. This book was released on 1974-01-01 with total page 157 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Loving Garbo written by Hugo Vickers and published by . This book was released on 1995 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mercedes de Acosta was a notorious figure. She had been brought up as a boy and had taken a girlfriend on her honeymoon. Her conquests included Isadora Duncan and Marlene Dietrich. Cecil Beaton first met Garbo at a party in 1932, but it was more than a decade before they became lovers. Despite her possessive friends and the presence of an increasingly sinister Mercedes, Garbo and Beaton spent many passionate months together in New York and California.

Download or read book Garbo written by John Bainbridge and published by BBS Publishing Corporation. This book was released on 1975 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There is only one Garbo, and this is her only definitive biography. Acclaimed by the critics-and a best seller- in its original version, it has now been brought up to the present, and beautifully illustrated with one hundred thirty-two memorable photographs. The result: an even more fascinating study of one of the screen's true immortals. In a period spanning less than two decades, from 1925 to 1941, this shy, working-class girl from Stockholm, the possessor of the face of the century, made twenty-four films, and became the most famous actress in the world. She also became one of its great ornaments and excitements and objects of wonder-"the unapproachable goddess," said Alistair Cooke, "of the most widespread and remarkable mythology in human history." As a consequence, she found herself the victim of more fatuous and hysterical journalism than any other personality on earth. Mercilessly hounded by the public and press at every turn, she developed an intense aversion to publicity that contributed to making the world's most beautiful woman into one of its loneliest. "I never said, 'I want to be alone, '" Garbo told a friend. "I only said, 'I want to be let alone.' There is all the difference." With sensitivity, wit, and understanding, Mr Bainbridge presents the whole fabulous story from its unlikely beginning through her last picture and into her retirement, which, ironically, Garbo never planned to make permanent. Her life today-her friends, her interests, her haunts-brings this absorbing biography up to the present moment. An appendix, "The Films of Greta Garbo," lists all of her pictures, both European and American, their casts, production credits, and the place and date of the premiere of each--Page 2 and 3 of cover

Download or read book Garbo written by Fritiof Billquist and published by London : Arthur, Baker. This book was released on 1960 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Savvy Sphinx written by Robert Dance and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2021-11-30 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Named a 2022 Richard Wall Award Finalist by the Theatre Library Association From the late 1920s through the thirties, Greta Garbo (1905–1990) was the biggest star in Hollywood. She stopped making films in 1941, at only thirty-six, and thereafter sought a discreet private life. Still, her fame only increased as the public and press clamored for news of the former actress. At the time of her death, forty-nine years later, photographers continued to stalk her, and her death was reported on the front pages of newspapers worldwide. In The Savvy Sphinx: How Garbo Conquered Hollywood, Robert Dance traces the strategy a working-class Swedish teenager employed to enter motion pictures, find her way to America, and ultimately become Hollywood’s most glorious product. Brilliant tactics allowed her to reach Hollywood’s upper-most echelon and made her one of the last century’s most famous people. Garbo was discovered by director Mauritz Stiller, who saw promise in her nascent talent and insisted that she accompany him when he was lured to America by an MGM contract. By twenty she was a movie star and the epitome of glamour. Soon Garbo was among the highest-paid performers, and in many years she occupied the number one position. Unique among studio players, she quickly insisted on and was granted final authority over her scripts, costars, and directors. But Garbo never played the Hollywood game, and by the late twenties her unwillingness to grant interviews, attend premieres, or meet visiting dignitaries won her the sobriquet the Swedish Sphinx. The Savvy Sphinx, which includes over a hundred beautiful images, charts her rise and her long self-imposed exile as the queen who abdicated her Hollywood throne. Garbo was the paramount star produced by the Hollywood studio system, and by the time of her death her legendary status was assured.

Download or read book Greta Garbo Came to Donegal written by Frank McGuinness and published by Faber & Faber. This book was released on 2010-03-04 with total page 117 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the summer of 1967 Greta Garbo comes to Donegal. Ireland is on the verge of violent change. Two couples are on the verge of parting. A woman tries to save her family, while a girl tries to save her future. Seemingly above it all is the loveliest and loneliest of all women, the great Garbo. But when the gods arrive, they can cause havoc, not least to themselves, as the divine Greta is to learn. Frank McGuinness's Greta Garbo Came to Donegal premiered at the Tricycle Theatre, London, in January, 2010.

Download or read book Legends of Hollywood written by Charles River Charles River Editors and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2018-02-28 with total page 66 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: *Includes pictures. *Includes a bibliography for further reading. "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." - Bette Davis Of all the great movie stars, there may be none more enigmatic than Greta Garbo, who remains internationally famous despite the fact her life and career raise more questions than answers. How did a Swedish actress with very little film acting experience in her native land arrive in the United States and achieve instant stardom? Most actresses had to wait years before they were offered starring roles in major films, yet Garbo was ushered to the front of the line and perched atop the MGM pantheon at a time in which it was the studio par excellence. How was she able to transition from silent films to "talkies" so fluidly, giving many of her most decorated performances during the 1930s? While stars like Charlie Chaplin never recovered from cinema's transition to synchronized sound, Garbo flourished, which is made all the more amazing by the fact she had a foreign accent that could easily have alienated American audiences and threatened her career. Finally, and perhaps most mystifying of all, why would Garbo retire in 1941, at just 36 years of age and two years removed from Ninotchka, arguably her most acclaimed film? As unique as Greta Garbo and her career were, there is no denying the impact that she had on audiences, both critics and working-class viewers. Not only was she the most lucrative star in the country by 1928, she also provoked awe from some of the most venerable film and cultural theorists, who attempted to articulate exactly what it was about her that proved so arresting (Swenson). Writing about her in a famous essay devoted to her face, Roland Barthes asserted, "Garbo still belongs to that moment in cinema when capturing the human face still plunged audiences into the deepest ecstasy, when one literally lose 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. A few years earlier the face of Valentino was causing suicides; that of Garbo still partakes of the same rule of Courtly Love, where the flesh gives rise to mystical feelings of perdition." Barthes' description hints at how Garbo's face was the primary attraction of her films, to the point that she achieved a spellbinding influence that made her one of the true goddesses of film history. At the same time, for as famous as Greta Garbo is as an actress, her films are not remembered so positively, if they are remembered at all. While Garbo herself was nominated on three occasions for the Academy Award for Best Actress, only one film of hers, Grand Hotel (1932), was even nominated for an Academy Award for Best Picture. For the most part, Garbo acted in films that were seemingly well beneath her, which was certainly the case with her films from the silent era. During the late 1920s, for example, she was routinely paired with leading man John Gilbert, yet out of the films they appeared in together - Flesh and the Devil (1926), Love (1927), A Woman of Affairs (1928), and Queen Christina (1933) - only the latter is well-remembered today. Even the first film for which she was nominated for an Oscar, Romance (1930), is commemorated only by Garbo's most fervent admirers. Ironically enough, it was just as Garbo neared the end of her career that she was just beginning to star in more critically revered films, movies such as Anna Karenina (1935), Camille (1936), and most of all, Ninotchka (1939). Legends of Hollywood: The Life and Legacy of Greta Garbo explores the life and career of Greta Garbo, analyzing her fame and how a notably shy young girl rose to the top of Hollywood.

Download or read book The Kindness of Strangers written by Salka Viertel and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2019-01-22 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A memoir about showbiz in the early 20th century that travels from the theaters of Vienna, Prague, and Berlin, to Hollywood during the golden age, complete with encounters with Franz Kafka, Albert Einstein, and Greta Garbo along the way. Salka Viertel’s autobiography tells of a brilliant, creative, and well-connected woman’s pilgrimage through the darkest years of the twentieth century, a journey that would take her from a remote province of the Austro-Hungarian Empire to Hollywood. The Kindness of Strangers is, to quote the New Yorker writer S. N. Behrman, “a very rich book. It provides a panorama of the dissolving civilizations of the twentieth century. In all of them the author lived at the apex of their culture and artistic aristocracies. Her childhood . . . is an entrancing idyll. In Berlin, in Prague, in Vienna, there appears Karl Kraus, Kafka, Rilke, Robert Musil, Schoenberg, Einstein, Alban Berg. There is the suffering and disruption of the First World War and the suffering and agony after it, which is described with such intimacy and vividness that you endure these terrible years with the author. Then comes the migration to Hollywood, where Salka’s house on Maybery Road becomes a kind of Pantheon for the gathered artists, musicians, and writers. It seems to me that no one has ever described Hollywood and the life of writers there with such verve.”