A century ago on Sunday, Greta Garbo made her first appearance on screen. Swedish silent epic The Saga of Gösta Berling, released on 10 March 1924, was based on Selma Lagerlöf’s bestselling novel and follows the misadventures of a disgraced ex-minister. Exiled to a wild estate in central Sweden, the commoner Berling falls victim to a marriage plot intended to unseat the heiress apparent. Garbo – born Greta Gustafsson, renamed especially for this appearance – plays the wife of the new intended heir. Cast while still a hopeful student at a Stockholm acting school, and not yet groomed into the rake-thin model of a Hollywood leading woman, she arguably steals the show. She is just as compelling in interior scenes as she is when pulled from a burning mansion over a frozen lake, pursued by wolves (the film is still revered for its set pieces).
When Gösta Berling reached MGM, the biggest of Hollywood’s major studios, two new recruits were made. One was the film’s director Mauritz Stiller, whose American career lasted only four years. The other was Greta Garbo. She soon became the industry’s brightest star, a byword for the exotic and emotionally distanced: vamps, Soviets, loner ballerinas, ambiguously foreign spies, Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (twice), Dumas’ ailing Lady of the Camellias. In the midst of Hollywood’s mass-production age she made only 28 films – her last in 1941, at the age of 35. Then she lived out the rest of her life in retirement until her death in 1990.
