Greta Garbo's lifetime reunites all the elements that make her one of the few true  legends in the pantheon of movie icons which graced our mass culture: humble beginnings, an iron will to succeed blended with a strange introverted quality, beauty, genius, fame, mystery and loneliness.

She did live as Karen Swenson, her best biographer elegantly puts it “a life apart” and led as she always wanted two lives “one for the movies and one for herself”. To study the various events which constructed and shaped Garbo's existence and led to her consecration as the screen's supreme actress and star as well as her withdrawal from films in 1941 is like trying to put together the various pieces of a tantalizing riddle without quite finding the answers.

Despite the considerable number of books and film studies or articles written on the celebrated actress, we still and will always inevitably find ourselves as mere mortals attempting to solve in vain the mysteries surrounding the life and art of a distant and yet invariably human goddess.