The Aging Of Greta Garbo

Of all the posts I've worked on over the past year and a half, the most popular turns out to be one I knocked off in about five minutes—a series of photos of John Wayne as he aged in the movies, from the shockingly handsome twenty-three year old of The Big Trail to the grizzled, terminally-ill sixty-nine year old in The Shootist. Echoing that theme, here are a series of photos of Greta Garbo, tracing her career and the lines on her face from childhood to the end of her life and most everything in between. Just between you and me, I'm not sure they really tell you anything other than that there was a woman named Greta Garbo made of flesh and blood who eventually withered and died. For me, she lived on the screen and nowhere else, but census takers would disagree. Now, if you really want photos of Greta Garbo, there are two places to go: Dr. Macro's High Quality Movie Scans and Garbo Forever. The former has hundreds of, yes, high quality scans from her movies; the latter has an exhaustive supply of portraits that covers her entire life. But for the nutshell version, here you go. As always, click on the photo to enlarge it. 1914—age 9 (that's Garbo in the middle) 1920—age 15 1923—age 18 (by Olaf Ekstrand) 1926—age 21 Flesh and the Devil (with John Gilbert) 1929—age 24 The Kiss 1932—age 27 As You Desire Me 1936—age 31 (color—not colorized—photo by Sinclair Bull) 1941—age 36 Two-Faced Woman 1946—age 41 (by Cecil Beaton) 1951—age 46 (by George Hoyningen-Huene) 1965—age 60 (by Cecil Beaton) 1990—age 84