The more famous she became, the more Garbo retreated from the spotlight according to her New York Timesobituary, she was known as the “Swedish sphinx” because she was so mysterious and elusive. “About summers there when it rains and that marvelous melancholy enfolds us.” “I have been thinking a lot about Tistad,” the actress wrote. Living amid the sunny opulence of Beverly Hills, Garbo longed for her native Sweden-and particularly for Tistad Castle, home of the Wachtmeister family. “I drive to the beach and take walks and that's always marvelous. “I am almost always alone and talk to myself,” she wrote in 1939, according to Sotheby’s.

But her letters reveal a pervasive sense of discontent of her life there. There she proved to be the rare star capable of transitioning from silent films to talkies. Garbo had already found success on the European screen when Louis B. By this point in time, Garbo, born Greta Lovisa Gustafson in Stockholm, Sweden, had become one of the most admired actresses in Hollywood for her ability to convey vulnerability and glamour on screen. The letters were written in the 1930s and 1940s, reports the BBC. During the course of their correspondence, Garbo unloaded her disdain of tabloid culture, her frustration with directors and, most cuttingly of all, dissatisfaction with her life in California.

As Maev Kennedy reports for the Guardian, the collection includes 36 letters, most of them written with pencil, addressed to Garbo’s friend, the Swedish countess Marta Wachtmeister. Nearly 30 years after the death of the iconic star, Sotheby’s is auctioning off a collection of Garbo’s letters that reveal the profound unhappiness of her solitude. “I only said, ‘I want to be let alone! There is all the difference.” “I never said, ‘I want to be alone,’” she explained, according to a 1955 piece in LIFEmagazine. The most famous quip attributed to Greta Garbo is short and sardonic: “I want to be alone.” But the actress, who made a practice of shunning reporters, premieres and fan mail, claimed that she had been misquoted.

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