For instance, Garbo dressed in menswear offscreen, she often referred to herself as masculine, and wanted to play a number of male roles on film. Yet on screen she projected every feminine quality – from fragile childlike innocence to worldly seductive sophistication, from the romantic damsel in distress to the tender self- sacrificing mother, from the demonically alluring lover to the divinely inspiring muse.
The two most authoritative biographers of Garbo, Barry Paris and Karen Swenson, differ significantly on Garbo's sexual identity. According to Paris, Garbo was “technically bisexual, predominantly lesbian, and increasingly asexual as the years went by.” Swenson however, emphasizes that in all her extensive research, she never found one woman who claimed to have slept with Garbo – except Mercedes de Acosta, whose statements must be taken with a grain of salt. What both authors agree on is that Greta's sexuality was more repressed than developed; she was passive and undemonstrative. Garbo's total lack of inhibition about being seen naked probably reflects a typical Scandinavian attitude. But when it came to physical connection - marriage or any committed relationship - she could not allow herself to be permanently possessed.
It has been said that Garbo exhibits an autoerotic intimacy in her work--she often seems to be talking to herself, or to some abstract ideal, rather than the man in her love scenes. In the long run, Garbo belonged to no one -- though in her films, she belongs to us all.
