Greta Garbo
Greta Garbo was a Swedish born MGM film star of the 20s and 30s. She was born Greta Gustafson in Stockholm, Sweden in 1905. MGM's founder Louis B. Mayer “discovered” her after seeing a film she’d made with the Finnish director Mauritz Stiller. Garbo was a chunky young woman (she was almost 19) when Mayer first met her. He insisted that she slim down measurably. He then he brought her and Stiller to Hollywood and put them under contract.
Greta Gustafson, renamed Greta Garbo, and Mauritz Stiller on board the SS Dreottningholm in 1925,bound for the United States and Hollywood.
Stiller only lasted a couple of years before he was fired (for intransigence with the bosses). Garbo remained and became the most popular female star with the female audience worldwide. She had a mystique with the audience that was enhanced by her having once allegedly muttered: “I vant to be alone ...” She left the business in 1941, unintentionally, when her contract (she was the studio’s highest paid star at the time) expired.
Although she’d made bids to return to the screen, it never happened. She spent the rest of her life living in New York in a large and comfortable apartment on East 52nd Street and the River. Well into the 1980s she could often be seen around town on personal walking/exercising tours (looking very plain and partly concealed with hats and bandanas and collars). Garbo-spotting was a favorite New York hobby for two generations of New Yorkers.
Garbo traveled to Europe frequently and to Los Angeles where she liked to spend the month of June in Beverly Hills – often staying with her friend Jean Howard.
She never married although her name was linked with certain men until her late fifties, and privately with certain women all her life.
She died at 84 in 1990 and left an estate of more than $20 million, accumulated from brilliant investments made with her film earnings (this was in the days before residuals of any kind), much of which had been advised from her last great man friend George Schlee who died in 1964.
Garbo's Apartment on the East River and 52nd in NYC
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