Garbo: A Biography

A perfect book on Greta Garbo. The one Hollywood star that has not faded from our film culture. Her name still carries the aura of Hollywood at it's peak. Her films are still watched. Her last picture was in 1942 and was not a success. So she walked away and never looked back. She invested her money wisely and never needed to work again. Buy this book which was well written.

This is the best biography of the great Garbo I have ever read. Very detailed and well written.

Barry Paris writes a living portrait of this enigmatic beauty. Fall, 1964, I was, age 24, waiting for a bus on the north side of Saks Fifth Avenue.Display windows were behind me. A slender, comely dressed lady, no hat, stopped 5 feet away from me, looking directly toward me.She did so for a good minute. I am nearsighted and was not wearing glasses then, so I thot she was admiring the SFA display windows.After a time, she turned east and continued walking. A lady also waiting for the bus came up to me and asked, "Do you know who that was?Greta Garbo." Well, I've never forgotten her look, her action, and my special moment of silent confrontation. "Garbo" the book let me know her challenges, her art, and her elusive power.

If you're interested in Garbo's life this is the book. Barry Paris does get a little too off-track, I believe, when he goes into so much detail about other film stars and films of the period, may be just to fill pages? That didn't bother me too much. I don't think there's a lot of info. on the reclusive star. It's quite well written, better than many biographies, and includes some nice photos.

I purchased this book based on so many great reviews, and boy they were right. An absolutely fascinating book that I am sorry I have finished. For some reason I have almost become obsessed with Miss Garbo and Mr. Paris' book was full of so many intersting facts about her life. So well worth the money.

Of all the books on Greta Garbo. This is by far the best of the bunch.

I thought the book was interesting but I was a bit disappointed with some of the author's personal opinions. I felt I had to read between some of the author's observations and would rather have just had the facts. However, I did enjoy the book and felt it portrayed Garbo in an honest light.

Well done and I am happily reading along. Fascinating. 5***** Thank you.

I read Paris's biography of Louise Brooks a few years ago and was mightily impressed. In the field of cinematic biography it is not unusual, given the insatiable demand of the public for information on their cinematic idols, for charlatans to get by via the publication of low-quality, derivative and sensationalist pap. Paris's book on Brooks was one of the best biogs, of any sort, that I've ever read. His work on Garbo is, if anything, even more thorough. Garbo was a much more complex subject than Brooks, but Paris has put together a convincing and coherent explanation (insofar as such a thing is possible, given her obsessively secretive nature) of Garbo's elusive and inscrutable nature. He charts her progress from disadvantaged beginnings in Stockholm through to her multi-millionaire, but very unhappy, existence in California not very many years after her stage and film debut in Sweden, followed by the fifty-odd years of restless, self-imposed seclusion that resulted from her sudden fall from grace with the Los Angeles studios of the 1940s. All her problematic relationships are examined as thoroughly as is possible, given the Rashomon-like variety of accounts that different people gave of her capricious nature, motivations, phobias (e.g. of air-conditioning) and sexual identity. Perhaps most telling of all comments is that, as he points out, she didn't actually say "I vant to be ALONE!", but "I vant to be LEFT alone" - small but crucial difference that speaks absolute volumes.Paris's conclusion is, effectively, that there IS no conclusion to be drawn from or about Garbo's behaviour and the overall course of her life, because there are simply too many contradictions inherent in her nature to allow of any simplistic judgements on how she became like she did and why she behaved as she did. As Churchill said of the Russians, she was a secret buried in a mystery wrapped in an enigma. And I'm happy to accept his un-conclusion, because nobody could possibly do any better than he has.Thoroughly recommended.

One of the most in-depth biographies I have ever seen on Garbo it was in excellent condition and gave me a chance to go into detail on one of my favorite stars. The author has gone over and above the call of duty and given a biography that is enlightening on one of the most enigmatic stars there has ever been.

Arrived in good time for my hospital appointment. I've only just started reading it so I can't really review the book as such. There's some nice pictures, though. Will update this review once I've finished reading.

What started off as a really entertaining and informative biography of one of my absolute favourite screen stars ended up becoming really dry and dull about halfway through. Truth be told, I didn't even finish reading the last couple of chapters in this book because I honestly didn't feel as if it had anything else to offer me (that was worthwhile, at least).Aside from its downward spiral at the halfway point, another thing about the biography that bothered me was how often the author (Barry Paris) mentioned silent film star Louise Brooks. Now don't misunderstand me, I adore Louise Brooks as much as the next person, but this biography wasn't supposed to be about her! It says "GARBO" on the cover in big, bold letters so therefore I'm going to assume it's a book about the life and career of Greta Garbo ... at times, it certainly didn't feel that way.Would I recommend this book to other people? No. There are better Garbo biographies out there (A Life Apart by Karen Swenson is one of them). This biography was a real disappointment.

There is a lot of detail in this book about every movie she made and much to be said of her relationships and her quirky personality.