Greta Garbo at 46, in her first color photo session (1951, photo by Anthony Beauchamp)

Stills from The Temptress (1926, dir. Fred Niblo, starring Greta Garbo) (click to enlarge)

Greta Garbo, moments after receiving your dinner invitation.

Rules for meeting Garbo #1: Be unavailable to meet Garbo.

“Of the Swedes who made it big in Hollywood, Garbo was the star of the silent movies era; my mother, Ingrid Bergman, was the star of the sound era. That’s how the press classified them.

When Mother first came to Hollywood, she immediately and politely sent Garbo some flowers and a note - she thought they could share some Swedish evenings: meatballs, aquavit, candles and relaxed conversation in their native tongue. Garbo sent a telegram accepting the invitation, but not until three months later, just as Mother was about to leave town. Mother told the director George Cukor, who was a friend of Garbo’s, about it and Cukor laughed. ‘Of course. Greta wouldn’t have sent the telegram unless she was certain you were leaving!’

-Isabella Rossellini

Greta Garbo in The Kiss (1929. dir. Jacques Feyder) (via)

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.

-Roland Barthes, “The Face of Garbo”, Mythologies (1957)

The Temptress (1926, dir. Fred Niblo, starring Greta Garbo)

The Temptress (1926, dir. Fred Niblo, starring Greta Garbo)

“There are many things in your heart you can never tell to another person. They are you, your private joys and sorrows, and you can never tell them. You cheapen yourself, the inside of yourself, when you tell them.”

-Greta Garbo (1931, via)