Movies: The Divine Woman

She seems in pain, yet amused by her misery, when she confesses to John Barrymore, "I want to be alone." That line, from the 1932 Grand Hotel, was often taken as Greta Garbo's autobiographical declaration. The unique actress remained above and apart from the Hollywood community in her 16 years there, and she compounded her aloof allure when, on quitting films at age 36, she took up residence in Manhattan and became the world's most famous, most observed recluse.

In a way, Garbo's early retirement was a gift to her fans, as if she wanted to protect the image of her screen beauty before they saw it crumble into mere middle-aged attractiveness. But she must also have known that her standing was secure. She saw that in 1941; we realize it today, as the world celebrates her centenary. There's a knowing, sumptuously illustrated book (Mark Vieira's Greta Garbo: A Cinematic Legacy), a tribute in films and photographs at New York City's Scandinavia House, a monthlong retrospective of all her extant Hollywood films on Turner Classic Movies (TCM), a 10-disc DVD collection (Garbo: The Signature Collection) and a fine documentary (Kevin Brownlow and Christopher Bird's Garbo, which can be found on TCM and in the DVD set). A first look at her classics--Flesh and the Devil and A Woman of Affairs among her silent films, Queen Christina and Camille among the talkies--will allow younger viewers to take a sip of their grandparents' intoxication. "What, when drunk, one sees in other women," Kenneth Tynan wrote of her, "one sees in Garbo sober."

It's not clear if she could have that effect on a generation unused to her and the conventions that then bound Hollywood. Her gestures may seem extravagant to eyes tutored in naturalism, her characters too ready to renounce passion for the sake of propriety. Yet in her day she was a revolutionary. Born Greta Gustafsson to a poor Stockholm family on Sept. 18, 1905, she was only 19 when she arrived at MGM (her only American movie home). Yet with her long, thin face and magnetic gravitas, she was already eerily mature. From the beginning in movies she was the older woman, setting the rules of romance. She would initiate a kiss. She would be on top, leaning down to clutch a man's head as if it were a child's, needing guidance, or a chalice in the private sacrament of her passion.

That take-charge attitude was modern but not feminist. Garbo didn't represent a different sex from men. She was a different species, an emissary from a higher world of thought and feeling. In her one indisputably great film, Camille, she bestows love on the youthful Armand (Robert Taylor) as a gift from the gods; and, with her anguished, rapturous death, she leaves it with him. Her performance raises melodrama to a feature-length epiphany. No actress today could play a courtesan's self-sacrifice at such a high and perfect pitch. None would dare to.