Greta Garbo’s uniquely photogenic beauty belies her great talent as an actress, as her performances in Queen Christina and Camille prove. A hint of a Garbo smile, touch, or glance conveyed volumes. She was languid, distant, and melancholy, yet in her love scenes she conveyed a passion and hunger that startled audiences and overturned American notions of eroticism and sexuality. Part of her fascination, too, is the mystery of her private lives and loves: “I want to be alone,” she insisted, but she remains the world’s divine woman.

The Movie Icon series: People talk about Hollywood glamour, about studios that had more stars than there are in heaven, about actors who weren't actors but were icons. Other people talk about these things, TASCHEN shows you. Movie Icons is a series of photo books that feature the most famous personalities in the history of cinema. These 192-page books are visual biographies of the stars. For each title, series editor Paul Duncan has painstaking selected approximately 150 high quality enigmatic and sumptuous portraits, colorful posters and lobby cards, rare film stills, and previously unpublished candid photos showing the stars as they really are. These images are accompanied by concise introductory essays by leading film writers; each book also includes a chronology, a filmography, and a bibliography, and is peppered with apposite quotes from the movies and from life.

David Robinson is a critic and historian of long experience. He was successively film critic for The Financial Times (London) and The Times (London). His books have included Buster Keaton, Hollywood in the Twenties, World Cinema, From Peepshow to Palace and the definitive Chaplin: His Life and Art. Robinson is currently director of the Giornate del Cinema Muto (the Pordenone International Film Festival), the most prestigious festival dedicated to film history.