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GARBO
The facts of Greta Gustafsson's early life 'are simple enough. She was born in Stockholm, September 18, 1905, the child of country people who had a hard time adjusting to the life of the city. Her father, a quiet, handsome man, was never able to provide his family with more than the bare necessities of life. After he died in 1920, Greta went to work as an apprentice in a barbershop (a fairly common choice of work for Swedish girls), quickly left for an apprenticeship in the millinery department of a large store. It was in this job that she gained her first theatrical experience, appearing in a short advertising film that the store prepared. After that she did another, about the bakery business, for the same director.
She had long held, and frequently talked about, an ambition to be an actress. So, in 1922, when the opportunity came, she left the department store in order to appear in her first professional film, a little knockabout comedy in the Sennett manner. When it was finished she gained admittance— with only the sketchiest of instruction to prepare her for her audition — to the Royal Academy, training ground for Swedish actors for two centuries. At the end of her first term, the academy, responding to a call from Mauritz Stiller, Sweden's leading film director and, with Victor Seastrom, the creator of that nation's excellent reputation for trendsetting art films, selected Greta and another student to audition for parts in Gosta Berling's Saga.
It is at this point that complexity enters the life of Greta Gustafsson. Against everyone's advice, Stiller gave her the second lead in that film. She was at the time shy, gawky, both chubby and cherubic in appearance, but, possessing a certain freshness of appeal which, while hardly notable, was suitable for her part. Much more important, however, was a passivity, a willingness to be molded, which fitted an obsession of Stiller's. He was in the grip of a dream — to find a Galatea to whom he could play Pygmalion.
Like so many film directors of the era, Stiller had an imperious ego, a desire to play (and a certain talent for) the part of the cinematic master builder, the universal filmic genius. Before finding young Greta Gustafsson, he had told
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