Greta Garbo received a New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Actress for her role as Anna.

Back home in St Petersburg she begins an affair with him, a liaison which destroys her marriage; she is prohibited from seeing her son Sergei.

[3] Writing for The Spectator in 1935, Graham Greene made much of Greta Garbo's powerful and theatrical acting in the film, noting that "it is Greta Garbo's personality which 'makes' this film, which fills the mould of the neat respectful adaptation with some kind of sense of the greatness of the novel".

[4] Helen Brown Norden, in a glowing review in Vanity Fair, wrote "Against the glittering background, these people move to their inevitable doom.

Garbo—still with that remote look of 'the implacable Aphrodite' on her face—acts with a dignity and a bitter passion which reach a mature climax in the final scene.