Lilli Palmer (German Actress)
A broad, high forehead, a strong chiselled nose, wide mouth, and most impressive of all, enormous dark blue eyes set under eyebrows curved like butterfly wings. When we swam together, she would dive and reappear on the surface with drops of water clinging separately to eyelashes that looked as if they had been purchased at the drugstore. To me, though, the unique quality of her face showed at its best when she was displeased. In Greta’s face, even her frown was a thing of beauty.
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Rupert Everett (English actor)
Being Gay is not an identity, it's a sideline. I'd love to have been cross-dressing with Garbo and having sex with everyone in 1930, but frankly it's not that exciting now.
 
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Liv Alexander (Norwegian actress)
![[Liv - CANNES poster]](Bilder/Garbo/Liv_Alexander-1a.jpg)
I was impressed by Garbo's eyes, the deep look that told me she saw things nobody else did. I wish she had made other movies. I wanted to see more, but then she was very selective and valued her mystique.
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Geraldine de Vorak (Garbo's Stand-In)
About her stand-in it was said that she had:
... everything which Garbo had, except whatever it is Garbo has. What Garbo had was a body that transmitted and received. She responded spontaneously with emotion and warmth and what she felt the audience felt, yet the information transmitted by the body was perceived as emanating from the face.
You can watch a marvellous actor from the back of a big theatre, his face just a microdot on the retina, and have the illusion you've seen every tiny expression. Such an actor can make a wooden mask smile, its carved lips tremble, its painted brows narrow.
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Clarence Brown (American director)
I have seen her change from love to hate and never alter her facial expression. |
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Alberto Arbasino (Italian reporter)
Alberto Arbasino after Garbo's death in 1990:
Thanks Greta Garbo for your movies and your phantasmagorical presence. But most of all, thank you because you did not espouse silly casues and then repudiate them for more other silly causes.
Thank you Garbo because you did not make any commercials, you did not advertise diets or anything at all, revivals of musicals made already by others.
Thank you because you avoided tv shows, true or false suicides publicised by the newspaper, indiscretions on flirts and thank you because you did not take part in any ridiculous social life.
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Anonymous (1928)
Look at Johnny Gilbert. Oh, isn't he a darbo? With nose transfixed to collarbone inhaling Greta Garbo.
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Cole Porter (American composer)
You're the top! You're the National Gallery. You're the top! You're Garbo's salary...
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Marie Dressler (American actress)
Garbo is lonely. She always has been and she always will be. She lives in the core of a vast aching aloneness. She is a great artist, but it is both her supreme glory and her supreme tragedy that art is to her the only reality.
The figures of living men and women, the events of everyday existence, move about her, shadowy, unsubstantial. It is only when she breathes the breath of life into a part, clothes with her own flesh and blood the concept of a playwright, that she herself is fully awake, fully alive.
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Kenneth Tynan (British theatre critic and writer)
Except physically, we know little about more about Garbo than we know about Shakespeare.
What when drunk one sees in other women, one sees in Garbo sober. |
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Marlene Dietrich (German/American actress)
She must think, that I'm trying to imitate her, but Garbo is unique. Garbo never gives Interviews and I wish I could do that too.
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Katharine Hepburn (American actress)
She had a real mystique and a real real gift for movie acting. |
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Bette Davis (American Actress)
Her instinct, her mastery over the machine, was pure witchcraft. I cannot analyse this woman's acting. I only know that no one else so effectively worked in front of a camera.
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Orson Welles (American actor/director)
If it could be said that Hollywood had a Queen, that Queen was Greta Garbo!
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Roman Navarro (American actor)
Greta Garbo is my ideal woman, yet I will never marry. |
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Robert Taylor (American actor)
She expressed emotions with her eyes. |
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Sir Laurence Olivier (English actor)
Greta Garbo is the Sarah Bernhardt of Film an s hy as an antelope.
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G.W. Pabst (German director)
A woman like that comes around only once every hundred years.
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Clara Boothe Luce
A deer in the body of a woman, living resentfully in the Hollywood zoo.
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Alistar Cooke (British journalist)
She gave you the impression that, if your imagination had to sin, it could at least congratulate itself on its impeccable taste.
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Tallulah Bankhead (American actress)
Her mystery was as thick as a London fog.
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Rouben Mamoulian (American director)
What was miraculous about Garbo was her innate mystique. It is difficult to describe a face of such radiant beauty…
When an actor or actress walks on stage and you suddenly become aware that the stage has been lit up, that everyone's eyes are fixed on the person in question – that kind of magnetism is nothing short of miraculous.
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Alice B. Toklas (She was the life partner of writer American writer Gertrude Stein)
Mademoiselle Hamlet
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Joan Crawford (American actress)
The only one who has ever been really mysterious
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John Gilbert (American actor)
One day, she's like a child, naïve, like a ten years old girl. The next day, she's mysterious woman 100 years old, who knows anything, tired of entire world, profound
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Tennessee Williams (American writer)
In appearance she is really hermaphroditic, almost as flat as a boy, very thin, the eyes and voice extraordinarily pure and beautiful but she has the cold quality of a mermaid or something. ...
She scares me to death.
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Federico Fellini (Italian director)
To know Garbo, it must know the North... She will be always a nordic with what means of ponderation and of introversion. Greta Garbo was the foundress of an religious order called "cinema"
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Mercedes d'Acosta (Spanish writer)
To know her, it must test the wind, the rain and skies sink who do be in the dumps. She belongs to those elements physically and symbolically... She will remain always a child of vikings, moved about by a snowy dream.
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![[Liv - CANNES poster]](Bilder/Garbo/Liv_Alexander-1.jpg)
