Greta Garbo practiced a witchcraft beyond analysis

Through the crowded frenzy of an aristocratic ball, a man sees her and is transfixed. Rushing across the room, he throws himself at this vision and gasps, "Who are you?" Her reply says it all: "What does it matter?" What indeed.

The character's name in 1926's "Flesh and the Devil" turned out to be the tongue-twisting Felicitas von Rhaden, but no one then or now cared about that. Names come and go, but the beauty and presence of the actress who played the role, the actress under whose spell the world fell, are eternal.

So it was with Greta Lovisa Gustafsson, known simply as Garbo. If ever an actress created pure magic on the screen, managing to be of this earth and not, it was Garbo. She was simultaneously accessible and unfathomable, a mystery we couldn't hope to penetrate, a tantalizing promise just out of reach. Although the only Oscar Garbo ever received was an honorary one, with what director Clarence Brown called her infallible ability to make audiences "see thought," she is arguably the greatest screen actress of all time.

Bette Davis, hardly ungifted or egoless herself, agreed, calling Garbo's work "pure witchcraft. I cannot analyze this woman's acting. I only know that no one else so effectively worked in front of a camera." As critic Kenneth Tynan famously said, "What, when drunk, one sees in other women, one sees in Garbo sober."


With the 100th anniversary of Garbo's birth coming this year, the UCLA Film and Television Archive and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences are paying a centennial tribute to this icon. A Lena Olin-hosted evening at the Academy's Samuel Goldwyn Theater starts things off on Thursday, followed by a film series at UCLA's James Bridges Theater.

As a personal tribute to this great star, I recently spent several days revisiting Garbo's legendary roles. And while the UCLA series has its share of rarities, including a reel from 1928's "The Divine Woman" (a film once thought completely lost), this is one star whose classic roles pleasantly surprise you on a renewed viewing. No matter how familiar we may think we are with films such as "Queen Christina," "Camille" and "Ninotchka," seeing them again remains a moving experience.

When you see Garbo's films all in a rush, you're especially conscious of how much the experience is like spending a day with just one person, someone with a distinct emotional through-line. Her characters' names and their peripheral characteristics may change, but the core remains the same.

Always in the moment, always intoxicated with the now, Garbo seemed not to be acting but to be actually living out her roles. In this she puts one in mind of Isaiah Berlin's famous essay on human nature "The Hedgehog and the Fox," in which the British philosopher quoted a Greek poet to the effect that "the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing." Garbo was clearly a hedgehog, and the one big thing she knew turned out to be central to the concerns of the cinema: how to convey the perils and joys of great romantic love.

Though her biographers say her private life was not driven by passion, Garbo specialized in playing women who wanted to live for love but were prevented from doing so by the cruel vagaries of the world. No one else, certainly no man, loved with her purity and commitment; she loved too deeply to be lastingly happy in this life.

When the Variety reviewer of 1935's "Anna Karenina" called her part "an uncompromisingly sad role," he couldn't help adding, "that is strawberry jam to Miss Garbo's toast."

Garbo conveyed her passion and numerous other emotions through a face that was universally considered a wonder of the cinematic age. Director G.W. Pabst said, "Such a face you see once in a century"; critic Tynan, forever enraptured, called it "the furthest stage to which the human face could progress, the nth degree of cultured refinement, complexity, mystery and strength."

No matter what it was expressing -- playfulness or displeasure, world-weary desperation or transporting happiness -- this was a face beyond mere words, a face to melt steel or haunt your dreams. No wonder so many of her films -- most famously "Queen Christina" but also "Anna Karenina," "The Torrent" and others -- end on an image of her face. No one dominated a close-up like her: She owned the screen and all adjacent territory. For directors who wanted to go with their strength, her face was the only possible choice.

"The Torrent," released in 1926, was Garbo's first American feature, done after she arrived from Sweden along with her mentor, the director Mauritz Stiller. If MGM was uncertain about her abilities when the studio signed her at Stiller's insistence, "The Torrent's" story of a poor Spanish peasant girl who became "La Brunna," the diva who thrilled Paris, erased all doubts.