In 1938, a youth was charged with stealing a still of Garbo from outside a Glasgow cinema. "Who is Greta Garbo?" the magistrate asked. So incredible was it not to recognise her name and face that his question was reported on the front pages of newspapers around the world. She was the most highly paid woman in America and had inherited the title "divine" from Sarah Bernhardt, whom she came to replace in the public imagination as the definitive version of Dumas's tubercular courtesan Marguerite in Camille
The daughter of a Stockholm labourer who died when she was 14, Greta Gustafsson went from whipping up lather in a barber's to being a shop girl, then via the national drama school into the movies with Mauritz Stiller, the gay director who became her devoted mentor, gave her the stage name Garbo and put her into his 1924 Swedish classic, The Atonement of Gösta Berling. MGM signed up Stiller, and he insisted they also bring his protegée to Hollywood.
Stardom was immediate and she made 10 silent films in five years, the greatest being Flesh and the Devil (1927), in which she was a femme fatale coming between two aristocratic Austrians played by lover John Gilbert and Lars Hanson. Her first talkie was a rare excursion into a working-class milieu as the eponymous waterfront whore in Anna Christie (1930). "Garbo Talks!" the posters shouted, and her opening line was: "Gimme a visky. Ginger ale on the side. And don't be stingy, ba-bee."
Nine years later, when she made an equally rare excursion into comedy as the Soviet commissar visiting Paris in Ninotchka, the tag-line became "Garbo Laughs!". Two years after that she retired aged 36 after the drubbing accorded to Two-Faced Woman, a disastrous comedy in which she pretends to be contrasted twins. She lived a private, though not reclusive existence for the next 48 years, thus adding to the mystery that led to her being called the Swedish Sphinx.
For 80 years, writers have been trying to capture in print her elusive presence, the seething passion beneath the placid exterior, the perfect planes of her face, her remarkable repertoire of gestures and facial expressions - the way she appeared illuminated from within. She played vulnerable women - doomed, romantic, betrayed, self-sacrificing - and suggested depths of feeling that were rarely there in the scripts of the polished but generally superficial vehicles MGM provided for her.
Kenneth Tynan "What, when drunk, one sees in other women, one sees in Garbo sober."
George Cukor "Garbo had this rapport with an audience. She could let them know she was thinking things, and thinking them uncensored."
Garbo on herself "I never said, 'I want to be alone'. I only said, 'I want to be left alone.' There is a world of difference."
Essential DVDs Flesh and the Devil, Anna Christie, Mata Hari, Queen Christina, Grand Hotel, Camille, Anna Karenina, Ninotchka.
Next: Alec Guinness