At MGM he was one of the main directors of their female stars – he directed Joan Crawford six times and Greta Garbo seven.

Ivens ' politics also put the kibosh on his first feature film project which was to have starred Greta Garbo.

Gordon was signed to an MGM film contract for a brief period in the early 1930s but did not make a movie for the company until she acted opposite Greta Garbo in Two-Faced Woman in 1941.

Laurents was soon hired to write the screenplay for a remake of the 1934 Greta Garbo film The Painted Veil for Ava Gardner.

* Joan Pujol Garcia ( Garbo ), a Spaniard who managed to get recruited by German intelligence, and sent them abundant but convincing misinformation from Lisbon, until the allies accepted his offer and he was employed by the British.

Seeing that sensational newcomer Greta Garbo was one of a kind, she went to Thalberg and " demanded recognition as one of another kind ".

Greta Garbo ( 18 September 1905 – 15 April 1990 ), born Greta Lovisa Gustafsson, was a Swedish film actress and an international star and icon during Hollywood's silent and classic periods.

Garbo was nominated four times for an Academy Award and received an honorary one in 1954 for her " luminous and unforgettable screen performances ".

As a child, Garbo was a shy daydreamer.

" In the second version, Mayer had already seen Gosta Berling before his Berlin trip and Garbo, not Stiller, was his primary interest.

Stiller and Garbo, who was then age twenty and unable to speak English, arrived in New York where they remained for three months without any word from MGM.

For both Garbo ( who did not want to play another vamp and did not like the script any more than she did the first one ) and Stiller, The Temptress was a harrowing experience.

Even though it became one of the top-grossing films of the 1926 – 27 season, with nearly in receipts, it was, because of its cost, the only Garbo film of the period to lose money.

After the disappointing Conquest ( 1937 ), Garbo was one of several major stars — including Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, Marlene Dietrich, and Katharine Hepburn — called " box office poison " in an open letter published by the National Theater Distributors of America.

The film was marketed with the tagline " Garbo laughs!

Although Garbo was humiliated by the negative reviews of Two-Faced Woman, she did not at first intend to retire.

As she had been during her Hollywood years, Garbo, with her innate need for solitude, was often reclusive.

Claims that Garbo was interested in the part cannot be substantiated.

Throughout her life, Garbo was known for taking long, daily walks with companions or by herself.

Legend has it that when a double marriage was arranged in 1926 ( with Eleanor Boardman and King Vidor ), Garbo failed to appear at the ceremony.

In 1940, Garbo met the Russian-born millionaire George Schlee who was married to fashion designer Valentina.

Recent biographers and others think it highly likely that Garbo was bisexual, or lesbian, and that she had intimate relationships with women as well as with men.

In 1927 Garbo was introduced to stage and screen actress Lilyan Tashman and strong evidence indicates that the two began an affair ; silent film star Louise Brooks stated that she and Garbo had a brief liaison the following year.

Garbo called Brown her favorite director.

* Little Miss Marker ( 1934 )— The film that made Shirley Temple a star, launched her career as perhaps America's most beloved child film star, and pushed her past Greta Garbo as the nation's biggest film draw of the year.

He also directed another of his favorite actresses, Greta Garbo, in Two-Faced Woman ( 1941 ), her last film before she retired from the screen.

Actresses such as Mary Pickford in all her films, Eleonora Duse in the Italian film Cenere ( 1916 ), Janet Gaynor in Sunrise, Priscilla Dean in Outside the Law and White Tiger, and Lillian Gish and Greta Garbo in most of their performances made restraint and easy naturalism in acting a virtue.

The 1933 film Queen Christina includes light-hearted and comedic moments between Garbo and her co-star John Gilbert, although the movie is generally regarded as a historical drama.

Garbo launched her career with a leading role in the 1924 Swedish film The Saga of Gosta Berling.

After working exclusively in dramatic films, Garbo turned to comedy with Ninotchka ( 1939 ), which earned her a fourth Academy Award nomination, and Two-Faced Woman ( 1941 ).

In 1922, Garbo caught the attention of director Erik Arthur Petschler who gave her a part in his short comedy, Peter the Tramp.

Garbo in her first leading role in the Swedish film The Saga of Gosta Berling | The Saga of Gösta Berling ( 1924 ) with Lars Hanson

Garbo remembered it as a picture associated with doom: on the fourth day of production, she received a telegram from Stockholm informing her of the death of her sister Alva at the age of twenty-three.

During this period, Garbo began to require unusual conditions during the shooting of her scenes.

Garbo had successfully made the transition to talkies and after three less profitable films, Romance ( 1930 ), Inspiration ( 1931 ), and Susan Lenox ( Her Fall and Rise ) ( 1931 ), she performed two of her most famous roles.

Garbo in her first talkie, Anna Christie ( 1930 film ) | Anna Christie ( 1930 )

Following a contract dispute with MGM, Garbo signed a new contract with the studio in 1932 which gave her more control over her films and co-stars.

In 1935, David O. Selznick wanted to cast her as the dying heiress in Dark Victory, but Garbo chose Tolstoy's Anna Karenina ( 1935 ) in which she played another of her renowned roles.

From the early days of her career, Garbo avoided the social functions in Hollywood, preferring to spend her time alone or with friends.

Garbo signing her US citizenship papers, in 1950

Charlie Chaplin and Greta Garbo were guests there, and Kaiser Wilhelm II himself held regular " gentlemens ' evenings " and other functions there in a room that came to be named after him-the Kaisersaal.

All of these were box-office hits, placing Shearer in competition with Joan Crawford and Greta Garbo as MGM's top actress through the remainder of the decade.

More recently, film critic Dennis Schwartz discussed the humor of Ninotchka, writing, " The sly political jokes include Garbo saying: " The last mass trials were a great success.

The screen tests — the last time Garbo stepped in front of a movie camera — were thought to have been lost for forty-one years until they were rediscovered in 1990 by film historians Leonard Maltin and Jeanine Basinger.

Parts of the footage were included in the 2005 TCM documentary Garbo.

Among them were Robert Flaherty, Emil Jannings, Greta Garbo and Fritz Lang, who delivered the funeral speech.

Garbo and Lubitsch were friendly and had hoped to work together on a movie for years, but this would be their only project.

Towards the end of the silents era, Colman was teamed with Hungarian actress Vilma Bánky under Samuel Goldwyn and the two were a popular movie team rivalling Greta Garbo and John Gilbert.

Among those whose stardom was guided by Thalberg were Lon Chaney, Ramon Novarro, John Gilbert, Joan Crawford, Clark Gable, Jean Harlow, Wallace Beery, Luise Rainer, Greta Garbo, Lionel Barrymore, and Norma Shearer, who would become his wife.

Others on the list were Joan Crawford, Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, Fred Astaire, Dolores del Río, Katharine Hepburn, Douglas Fairbanks, and James Cagney.

Garbo and the critics were impressed by Dressler's acting ability, and so was MGM, which quickly signed Dressler to a $ 500-per-week contract.

Some of the expressions for falling in love used by Winchell were: " pashing it ", " sizzle for ", " that way, go for each other ", " garbo-ing it ", " uh-huh "; and in the same category, " new Garbo, trouser-crease-eraser ", and " pash ".

The two were very close sporadically and then apart for lengthy periods when Garbo, annoyed by Mercedes ' obsession, coupled with her own neuroses, ignored her.

" She was a very valuable asset for MGM, because the studio had so many femmes fatales – Garbo, Crawford, Shearer, and Harlow – that we were always on the lookout for ' shady lady ' stories.

They were at that time already running ' Garbo ' ( Juan Pujol ), ' Zig-Zag ' ( Eddie Chapman ) and ' Tricycle ' ( Dusan Popov ), supposedly German agents, to whom they were paying large sums but who were actually working for the British.

Dinners at Pickfair were legendary ; guests included Charlie Chaplin ( who also lived next door ), the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Greta Garbo, George Bernard Shaw, Albert Einstein, Elinor Glyn, Helen Keller, H. G.

Among his successes of the 1930s were Anna Karenina ( 1935 ) with Greta Garbo and Fredric March ; Professional Soldier ( 1935 ) with Victor McLaglen and Gloria Stuart ; Little Lord Fauntleroy ( 1936 ) with Dolores Costello and C. Aubrey Smith ; Lloyd's of London ( 1937 ) with Madeleine Carroll and Tyrone Power ; The Devil is a Sissy ( 1936 ) with Mickey Rooney and Jackie Cooper ; and Captains Courageous ( 1937 ) with Spencer Tracy.

Although she stated that " the boys the series were given all the best lines ," in Love Business Dorothy has some of the funniest lines in the entire series, delivered while Chubby is practicing his seductive patter on an oversized cutout poster of Greta Garbo in front of a movie house:

His photos of Greta Garbo were credited with boosting her career.

After a brief informal meeting two months earlier when they were impressed with each other, Countess Marie Walewska ( Greta Garbo ) formally meets Napoleon Bonaparte ( Charles Boyer ) at a ball in Warsaw.