Many critics and film historians consider her performance as the doomed courtesan Marguerite Gautier in Camille (1936) to be her finest and the role gained her a third Academy Award nomination.

In her retirement, she shunned publicity, led a private life, and became an art collector whose paintings included works by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Pierre Bonnard and Kees van Dongen.

[5] Although she refused throughout her life to talk to friends about her reasons for retiring, four years before her death, she told Swedish biographer Sven Broman: "I was tired of Hollywood.

Her first commercial premiered on 12 December 1920[32] In 1922, Garbo caught the attention of director Erik Arthur Petschler, who gave her a part in his short comedy, Peter the Tramp.

She was recruited in 1924 by the Finnish director Mauritz Stiller to play a principal part in his film The Saga of Gösta Berling, a dramatization of the famous novel by Nobel Prize winner Selma Lagerlöf, which also featured the actor Lars Hanson.

"[43] A Swedish friend in Los Angeles helped by contacting MGM production boss Irving Thalberg, who agreed to give Garbo a screen test.

Thalberg was impressed and began grooming the young actress the following day, arranging to fix her teeth, making sure she lost weight and giving her English lessons.

"[43] During her rise to stardom, film historian Mark Vieira notes, "Thalberg decreed that henceforth, Garbo would play a young, but worldly wise, woman.

"[67] Profits from her third movie with Gilbert, A Woman of Affairs (1928), catapulted her to top Metro star of the 1928–1929 box office season, usurping the long-reigned silent queen Lillian Gish.

Film historian and critic David Denby argues that Garbo introduced a subtlety of expression to the art of silent acting and that its effect on audiences cannot be exaggerated.

"[71] Despite her status as a star of silent films,[72] the studio feared that her Swedish accent might impair her work in sound, and delayed the shift for as long as possible.

[77] Her performance received positive reviews; Mordaunt Hall of The New York Times remarked that Garbo was "even more interesting through being heard than she was in her mute portrayals.

"[80] The following year, she played a Russian ballerina in Grand Hotel (1932), opposite an ensemble cast, including John Barrymore, Joan Crawford, and Wallace Beery, among others.

[29][81][82][83] Garbo's close friend Mercedes de Acosta then penned a screenplay for her to portray Joan of Arc,[84] but MGM rebuffed the idea, and the project was shelved.

For her leading man, MGM suggested Charles Boyer or Laurence Olivier, but Garbo rejected both, preferring her former co-star and lover John Gilbert.

David O. Selznick wanted to cast Garbo as the dying heiress in Dark Victory (eventually released in 1939 with other leads), but she chose Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina (1935), in which she played another of her renowned roles.

On 3 May 1938, Garbo was among the many stars—including Joan Crawford, Norma Shearer, Luise Rainer, Katharine Hepburn, Mae West, Marlene Dietrich, Fred Astaire, and Dolores del Río, among others—dubbed to be "Box Office Poison" in an article published by Harry Brandt on behalf of the Independent Theatre Owners of America.

The film was one of the first Hollywood movies which, under the cover of a satirical, light romance, depicted the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin as being rigid and gray when compared to Paris in its pre-war years.

[105] The screen tests—the last time Garbo stepped in front of a movie camera—were thought to have been lost for 41 years until they were re-discovered in 1990 by film historians Leonard Maltin and Jeanine Basinger.

[109] Although she refused throughout her life to talk to friends about her reasons for retiring, four years before her death, she told Swedish biographer Sven Broman: "I was tired of Hollywood.

"[115][116] The artist James Montgomery Flagg said in 1933 [117] that when he was allowed to sketch Garbo at a director's party in Hollywood some years earlier she told him she suffered from melancholia.

[151] Italian film director Luchino Visconti allegedly attempted to bring Garbo back to the screen in 1969 with the small part of Maria Sophia, Queen of Naples in his adaptation of Proust's Remembrance of Things Past.

[153][152] In 1971, Garbo vacationed in Southern France at the summer home of her close friend Baroness Cécile de Rothschild[154] who introduced her to Samuel Adams Green, an art collector and curator in New York City.

[185][186] The two remained friends—with ups and downs—for almost 30 years, during which time Garbo wrote de Acosta 181 letters, cards, and telegrams, now at the Rosenbach Museum & Library in Philadelphia.

[193][194] Towards the end of her life, only Garbo's closest friends knew she was receiving six-hour dialysis treatments three times a week at The Rogosin Institute in New York Hospital.

[203] About her work in silents, film critic Ty Burr said: "This was a new kind of actor—not the stage actor who had to play to the far seats, but someone who could just look and with her eyes literally go from rage to sorrow in just a close-up.

'The Divine', the 'dream princess of eternity', the 'Sarah Bernhardt of films', are only a few of the superlatives writers used in describing her over the years ... She played heroines that were at once sensual and pure, superficial and profound, suffering and hopeful, world-weary and life-inspiring.

[220] Author Ernest Hemingway provided an imaginary portrayal of Garbo in his novel For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940): "Maybe it is like the dreams you have when someone you have seen in the cinema comes to your bed at night and is so kind and lovely ...

[223] Pornographic film director Peter de Rome shot footage of Garbo walking across First Avenue that he inserted into his 1974 feature Adam & Yves.

The Swedish royal medal Litteris et Artibus, which is awarded to people who have made important contributions to culture (especially music, dramatic art, or literature) was presented to Garbo in January 1937.