Her Air of Melancholy Was Real
“And if I would stop making film, I could go and see if I could find out a little about it.” She stopped making films a few years later. Her last role was in 1941’s Two-Faced Woman. Garbo’s on-screen sense of melancholy was indeed genuine, but what she found irritating was the popular idea that she always avoided company.
‘Two-Faced Woman’ Film Still. Photo by Donaldson Collection/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
“I never said ‘I want to be alone,’” she clarified in a 1955 Life magazine article. “I only said, ‘I want to be let alone!’ There is all the difference.” Garbo didn’t just write to her friend in Austria; she also sent letters to another female confidante, the Swedish countess Marta Wachtmeister, to whom she also expressed her feelings of isolation.