- Greta Garbo centenary: In celebration of the 100th birthday of the cinema legend and native Stockholmer, the Swedish Film Institute will be presenting 13 features and several shorts at its Stockholm Cinemateket. Titles include The Saga of Gösta Berling, Queen Christina, and Ninotchka.
Greta Garbo centenary celebration: Swedish Film Institute to present 13 features and several shorts
Greta Garbo, one of filmdom’s biggest stars, would have turned 100 this past Sept. 18.
In the United States, where she spent most of her big-screen career, Garbo has already been the subject of several homages, including the release of Warner Home Video’s DVD box set “Garbo: The Signature Collection.”
In her native Sweden, the Swedish Film Institute is celebrating Garbo’s centenary with a six-week retrospective at its Stockholm Cinemateket. The series consists of 13 feature-length titles, ranging from Garbo’s first and only Swedish-made feature, Mauritz Stiller’s romantic drama The Saga of Gösta Berling (1924), to her final Hollywood star vehicle, George Cukor’s unfairly maligned romantic comedy Two-Faced Woman (1941). (See the full list of titles further below.)
In addition, those attending the screening of Garbo’s first Hollywood movie, Monta Bell’s Torrent (1926), will also get the chance to check out a trio of Swedish-made shorts from the 1920s and the surviving reel from Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s 1928 drama The Divine Woman, directed by Garbo’s fellow Swede Victor Sjöström and costarring another Swede, Lars Hanson.
Strangely missing from the film series: Clarence Brown’s Anna Christie (1930), in which Garbo plays a Swedish sex worker, and George Cukor’s Camille (1937), one of the star’s most acclaimed vehicles. In point of fact, both titles earned her Best Actress Academy Award nominations, along with Brown’s romantic drama Romance (like Anna Christie, for the period 1929–1930) and Ernst Lubitsch’s romantic comedy Ninotchka (1939).
Garbo would never win a competitive Oscar, but at the 1955 ceremony the Academy gave her an Honorary Award. Nancy Kelly accepted the statuette on her behalf.
‘Images of Greta’
As reported by Swedish Film Critics Association member Moira Sullivan in The Local, the Swedish Film Institute’s Greta Garbo movie series kicked off on Sept. 18 with a new print of The Saga of Gösta Berling, which was accompanied by a new score by Matti Bye. Lars Hanson, who, as seen in the previous paragraph, would also work with Garbo in Hollywood, stars as a defrocked Lutheran minister.
Sullivan adds that the Institute is also hosting the exhibit “Images of Greta,” while “short films screened in the exhibition hall … reveal an even younger Garbo [than the 18-year-old seen in The Saga of Gösta Berling] at [Stockholm’s] PUB department store modeling clothes, eating cake with friends or camping near a lake.”
Also on display are private letters, Garbo’s notebook from the Royal Dramatic Theatre’s drama school, and the black-velvet-and-white-lace dress she wore in The Saga of Gösta Berling.
Greta Garbo died at age 84 on April 15, 1990.
Stockholm Cinemateket’s Greta Garbo film series
Below is the list of Greta Garbo titles screening at the Stockholm Cinemateket from Sept. 18 to Oct. 31. Post–1925 titles were all produced by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.
The Saga of Gösta Berling / The Atonement of Gösta Berling / Gösta Berling’s Saga (Sweden, 1924)
With Swedish intertitles.
Director: Mauritz Stiller.
Cast: Lars Hanson, Greta Garbo, Karin Swanström, Oscar Byström.The Joyless Street / Street of Sorrows / Die freudlose Gasse (Germany, 1925)
Director: G.W. Pabst.
Cast: Greta Garbo, Asta Nielsen, Werner Krauss, Einar Hanson.Torrent (1926)
Director: Monta Bell.
Cast: Ricardo Cortez, Greta Garbo, Gertrude Olmstead, Edward Connelly.Torrent will be accompanied by the following shorts:
Advertising film from Stockholm’s PUB department store, where Garbo worked as a clerk (Sweden, 1921).
Erik Arthur Petschler’s Peter the Tramp / Luffar-Petter (Sweden, 1922).
One reel from The Divine Woman (USA, 1928).
Unidentified nonfiction film, (Sweden, 1929).Flesh and the Devil (1926)
Director: Clarence Brown.
Cast: John Gilbert, Greta Garbo, Lars Hanson, Barbara Kent.A Woman of Affairs (1928)
Director: Clarence Brown.
Cast: John Gilbert, Greta Garbo, Lewis Stone, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Johnny Mack Brown.Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise (1931)
Director: Robert Z. Leonard.
Cast: Greta Garbo, Clark Gable, Jean Hersholt.The Kiss (1929)
Director: Jacques Feyder.
Cast: Greta Garbo, Conrad Nagel, Lew Ayres, Holmes Herbert.Mata Hari (1931)
Director: George Fitzmaurice.
Cast: Greta Garbo, Ramon Novarro, Lionel Barrymore, Lewis Stone.Grand Hotel (1932)
Director: Edmund Goulding.
Cast: Greta Garbo, John Barrymore, Joan Crawford, Wallace Beery, Lionel Barrymore, Jean Hersholt, Lewis Stone.Queen Christina (1933)
Director: Rouben Mamoulian.
Cast: Greta Garbo, John Gilbert, Ian Keith.Anna Karenina (1935)
Director: Clarence Brown.
Cast: Greta Garbo, Fredric March, Maureen O’Sullivan, Freddie Bartholomew, Basil Rathbone.Ninotchka (1939)
Director: Ernst Lubitsch.
Cast: Greta Garbo, Melvyn Douglas, Ina Claire, Bela Lugosi.Two-Faced Woman (1941)
Director: George Cukor.
Cast: Greta Garbo, Melvyn Douglas, Constance Bennett, Roland Young, Ruth Gordon, Robert Sterling.
“Greta Garbo Centenary: Swedish Film Institute Series” notes
Stockholm Cinemateket website.
Greta Garbo Anna Christie image: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.
“Greta Garbo Centenary: Swedish Film Institute Series” last modified in August 2026.