Sweden Gears Up to Celebrate Garbo's 100th

STOCKHOLM, Sweden - Sweden is marking the 100th anniversary of Greta Garbo's birth this weekend with film retrospectives, a new postage stamp and a museum exhibition honoring the actress who became the most famous face — and the most famous recluse — the country ever produced.

Garbo, born Greta Lovisa Gustafsson in a working-class Stockholm neighborhood on Sept. 18, 1905, was discovered in a department store film short, trained at Sweden's Royal Dramatic Theatre, and sailed for Hollywood in 1925 with her mentor, director Mauritz Stiller.

In 15 years she made 24 films, earned four Academy Award nominations and defined the screen vamp in silents before proving, with 1930's "Anna Christie," that the divine Garbo could talk. MGM's slogan said it all: "Garbo Talks!"

Her best-known vehicles — "Grand Hotel," "Queen Christina," "Camille," and the 1939 comedy "Ninotchka," advertised with the line "Garbo Laughs!" — anchor the retrospective series opening at Stockholm's cinematheque this weekend.

She retired at 36, at the height of her fame, and spent half a century declining every interview, honor and comeback offer. Her supposed wish "to be alone" — actually a line from "Grand Hotel" — became her epitaph in the popular imagination.

She died in New York in 1990 at 84. Her ashes were returned to Sweden nine years later and buried in a Stockholm woodland cemetery after a family dispute over the gravesite.

The Swedish Film Institute's centennial program includes a traveling exhibition of photographs, costumes and letters, and the postal service's commemorative stamp — engraved from a 1935 portrait — goes on sale this weekend.

Critics argue the Garbo mystery is the career: the face photographed so carefully it seemed to hold every emotion at once. "She was the last star who belonged to the camera alone," a Stockholm film historian said. "We have been trying to replace her for 65 years."