My great aunt Greta

Screen goddess Garbo's great nephew tells Martin Phillips why she was Queen of Hollywood

- 

With Melvyn Douglas in Two-Faced Woman, 1941

Scott Reisfield has glorious boyhood memories of swimming with his great-aunt in the family pool, joining her for walks in their New Jersey neighbourhood, and going with her to a performance by her singer friend Maurice Chevalier.

As they went out and about, he would have been one of the few who did not recognise her as Greta Garbo, one of the greatest actors of her generation.

“To me she was just Aunt Kata,” he says as we chat on a transatlantic call.

But though, at the time, he had not seen her films, nor read reports about her becoming a lonely recluse, he could have vouched for the fact that those stories were nonsense, as was much that was written about the controversial Swedish-born star.

What was rarely disputed was that she transformed Hollywood, shining brightly throughout the Golden Age of silent movies and the early years of talkies in the 1920s and 30s with her naturalistic acting.

She mesmerised her bosses, fellow actors and audiences alike with an unrivalled ability to convey emotions with the merest change of facial expression. Bette Davis once said: “Her instinct, her mastery over the machine was pure witchcraft. I cannot analyse this woman's acting. I only know that no one else so effectively worked in front of a camera.”

Now businessman Scott, 65, with access to his family's archives and personal letters, has written a book to paint a truer picture of the woman Orson Welles described as Queen of Hollywood and to show how, when society was outgrowing old Victorian morals, she was the blueprint for the modern woman.