Greta Garbo

Greta Garbo was a Swedish-American actress widely considered one of the greatest in Hollywood history, known for Flesh and the Devil (1926), Anna Christie (1930), Queen Christina (1933) — in which she played a gender-fluid monarch who kisses another woman on the mouth — Camille (1936), and Ninotchka (1939). She never married and spent nearly three decades in a close, volatile relationship with the openly lesbian poet and playwright Mercedes de Acosta, a bond widely understood to have been romantic, though its precise nature remains debated by biographers. Her famous line — "I want to be alone" — has taken on additional resonance given her lifelong refusal to define her identity or sexuality publicly. Biographers have extensively documented her relationships with women, including de Acosta and Marlene Dietrich, and she is now recognized as a queer icon of classical Hollywood whose ambiguity was both a product of its time and a form of self-protection.