Garbo: A biography - Hardcover

Barry Paris

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0283999543 ISBN 13: 9780283999543

Publisher: Sidgwick & Jackson Ltd, 1995

Synopsis

Drawing on interviews with Ingmar Bergman and Max von Sydow amongst others, Barry Paris examines the "brooding northern soul" that defined Garbo's work and personality and which was rooted in an unhappy childhood. Her later relationships with G.W. Pabst, Louis B. Mayer, John Gilbert, George Cukov and Ernst Lubitsch are explored as are some of her lesser-known friendships with women, notably Pola Negri, Lillian Gish and Ava Gardner. He also considers the question of whether Garbo actually intended to retire from the cinema - and brings to light the secret final years of her life.

About this title

From Publishers Weekly:

Greta Garbo's melancholy self-obsession, her paradoxical need to perform and withdraw, manifested themselves in her teens, shows Paris (Louise Brooks) in a moving biography that unearths connections between the private woman and the public actress. Recurring traumas of abandonment-the deaths of her father, Karl, a Stockholm landscapist, when she was 14, and of her beautiful actress sister Alva, victim of cancer at age 23-molded Garbo (1905-1990) into a high-strung, hypersensitive recluse pathologically afraid of betrayal, of commitment, of pregnancy, according to Paris. The Swedish sphinx moved to Hollywood in 1925 and became "the sex fantasy of the century," an androgynous, exotic persona on whom millions projected their desires, yet, by this account, she was a largely celibate narcissist who longed for an idealized hearth and home. Garbo found a substitute family in the home of her closest friend, actress Salka Viertel, and this revealing biography, featuring 180 photographs woven into the narrative, draws on the 50-year Garbo-Viertel correspondence, on firsthand reminiscences and on Garbo's taped conversations with her confidante, New York City art dealer Sam Green, which fills in details of her last decades of self-imposed exile in Manhattan and trips abroad. Movie/Entertainment Book Club alternate; author tour.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist:

Cruel words were spoken and printed about Greta Garbo after she died a few years ago. In contrast, this latest book clearly establishes itself as the definitive, responsible biography she deserves. Yes, Garbo was peculiar, but she wasn't incomprehensible. And Paris, New Yorker writer and author of a previous well-received Hollywood biography, Louise Brooks (1989), comprehends her commendably. Born Greta Gustafson in 1905 in Stockholm, Sweden, in modest circumstances, Garbo began in the fledgling film industry in her native country under the tutelage of famed Swedish director Mauritz Stiller. Paris clears up the misconceptions surrounding her arrival in Hollywood in 1925, then proceeds to document with rich and accurate detail her American movie career, observing with empathy the "aloof insecurity" that made her distant from people and her public, the conflicted sexuality that left her with unconventional friendships and a unique allure onscreen, and the set of circumstances by which she inadvertently retired from the movie business. Paris fully reconstructs Garbo's post-Hollywood years without resorting to tabloid-style clich{‚}es about that "weird recluse in the sunglasses." Instead, the author more than substantiates his assertion that Garbo was "an anomaly, not a mystery." A necessary purchase for all biography and film collections. Brad Hooper

About this edition

• Publisher: Sidgwick & Jackson Ltd
• Publication date: 1995
• ISBN 10: 0283999543
• ISBN 13: 9780283999543
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 512