Ideal Beauty
The Life and Times of Greta Garbo
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- US$34.99
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- US$34.99
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One of the silver screen’s greatest beauties, Greta Garbo was also one of its most profound enigmas. A star in both silent pictures and talkies, Garbo kept viewers riveted with understated performances that suggested deep melancholy and strong desires roiling just under the surface. And offscreen, the intensely private Garbo was perhaps even more mysterious and alluring, as her retirement from Hollywood at age thirty-six only fueled the public’s fascination.
Ideal Beauty reveals the woman behind the mystique, a woman who overcame an impoverished childhood to become a student at the Swedish Royal Dramatic Academy, an actress in European films, and ultimately a Hollywood star. Chronicling her tough negotiations with Louis B. Mayer at MGM, it shows how Garbo carved out enough power in Hollywood to craft a distinctly new feminist screen presence in films like Queen Christina. Banner draws on over ten years of in-depth archival research in Sweden, Germany, France, and the United States to demonstrate how, away from the camera’s glare, Garbo’s life was even more intriguing. Ideal Beauty takes a fresh look at an icon who helped to define female beauty in the twentieth century and provides answers to much-debated questions about Garbo’s childhood, sexuality, career, illnesses and breakdowns, and spiritual awakening.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Historian Banner (Marilyn) traces the life and legacy of "the West's preeminent female beauty" in this enriching and immersive biography. Born in 1905 Stockholm to poor Swedish laborers, Greta Gustafsson fantasized early on about becoming a Hollywood star. By age 15, she was selling hats at a Swedish department store, modeling, and acting in films. Banner unpacks her ascent to "MGM's greatest tragic actress" after her 1925 move to Hollywood; the many men who served as her father figures, romantic partners, or career guides, including director Mauritz Stiller, who convinced her to change her surname to the catchier Garbo; her complicated public image (she stopped granting interviews early in her career); her intractable battles with food and weight (anorexia nervosa plagued her throughout her life); and her 1941 decision to "quit" Hollywood. In the process, Banner meticulously examines Garbo's "ideal beauty" as a canvas onto which filmmakers could project their creative vision (her luminous, "large, deep-set almond eyes" and "high cheekbones and sunken cheeks" made her especially expressive on-screen), as well as a symbol of a culturally "hegemonic," willowy, and thin beauty that requires dieting and strenuous exercise "as dangerous and difficult to achieve today as it was in Garbo's day." The result is a rewarding look at an enigmatic star.
