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), Camille (1936), and Ninotchka (1939). She never married and spent decades in a close relationship with actress Mercedes de Acosta, widely understood to be romantic. 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; 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.