She’s a gorgeous Hollywood superstar without a husband or even an official boyfriend. She shuns questions about her relationships, and her best-loved films are those in which her affairs with men ended tragically or are merely incidental to the larger story of her personal quest. Her talent as an actress is legendary, but, unlike her celebrity peers, the topic of her personal life is largely ignored by an otherwise relentlessly tell-all press.

Yes, it sounds like Jodie Foster, give or take eighty years. But it's actually a description of the legendary actress Greta Garbo, who perfected the art of being world-famous without really being known at all in the 1920s.

And to this day, her queer fans are the only portion of the population likely to know about her queer life.

Younger women of this generation may never have seen even one of Greta Garbo’s movies, but they recognize her name. This is due in part to Garbo’s self-imposed exile from Hollywood at the age of 36 and her infamous New York hermitage until her death at 86 in 1990. But Garbo’s enigma can also be linked to the secrecy surrounding her sexual orientation. Even today the mainstream media hesitates to delve deeply into her romantic life and has difficulty reconciling her movie goddess stature with the evidence of her love for other women.

She was born in 1905 as Greta Lovisa Gustafsson in Sweden. Her family’s poverty and her father’s early death led her to modeling for money by the age of 14, and her stunning looks caught the eye of gay filmmaker Mauritz Stiller. Stiller recognized her potential and began grooming her for stardom. He urged her to change her name—first to Mona Gabor and finally to Greta Garbo—and directed the film that brought her to the attention of Hollywood’s Louis B. Mayer, The Atonement of Gosta Berling (1924).

Before departing for Mayer and Hollywood, Garbo filmed The Joyless Street with the legendary German director G.W. Pabst. According to Diana McLellan’s dishy expose The Girls: Sappho Goes to Hollywood (2000), it was on the set of The Joyless Street that the 19-year old Garbo met the 23-year old Marlene Dietrich.

Dietrich was her opposite—as wild and openly sexual as Garbo was naïve and prim. The nature of their relationship would be a source of contention (both denied that they had ever met, Dietrich denied that she was in the film at all) and gossip that would hover over both for the rest of their lives. (Pabst himself caused a scandal when he directed Pandora’s Box (1929), shocking American audiences with the seduction of Hollywood pixie Louise Brooks by a rakish lesbian character that he reportedly modeled after Marlene Dietrich. The film made Brooks an international star.)

In The Girls, McLellan’s argues that Dietrich seduced Garbo and then gossiped to those in their circle about Garbo’s shabby undergarments and provincial attitude about sex. Dietrich referred to Garbo as a “peasant”, and McLellan proposes that the ill-fated affair humiliated and traumatized Garbo. She theorizes that Dietrich’s scarring betrayal may have instigated Garbo’s lifelong denial of her sexual orientation and eccentric disavowal of all romantic liaisons.

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