Greta Garbo was a Swedish actress primarily known for her work in the United States during Hollywood’s silent film period and part of its subsequent Golden Age. Once moving to Hollywood, she appeared in only 27 movies, yet she remains one of the most popular and recognizable Hollywood stars. The MGM marketing ploy “Garbo talks” became a catch-phrase of the 1930s. Her popularity with the Depression-era audiences allowed her to dictate the terms of her contract in 1932, and she became increasingly choosy about her roles. After 1941, she accepted no more roles, and retired to an apartment in New York City.

Regarded as one of the greatest and most inscrutable movie stars ever produced by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and the Hollywood studio system, Garbo appeared in both the silent and the talkies era of film-making. She was one of the few silent movie actresses to successfully negotiate the transition to sound, which she achieved in 1930’s Anna Christie, for which she was nominated for an Academy Award. She appeared twice as the fabled Anna Karenina, once in 1927’s silent film, Love, and in 1935’s Anna Karenina, for which she received the New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Actress. She considered her 1936 performance as the courtesan Marguerite Gautier as her best performance and that role in Camille earned her a second Academy Award nomination. During the World War II era, MGM attempted to recast the somber and melancholy Garbo into a comic actress, in 1939’s Ninotchka, which MGM touted with the tagline, “Garbo laughs,” followed by 1941’s Two-Faced Woman, in which Garbo danced and sang. For Ninotchka, Garbo was again nominated for an Academy Award; Two-Faced Woman did well at the box office, but was a critical failure. Garbo received a 1954 Honorary Academy Award.

Garbo reportedly entered into a variety of intimate liaisons with men and women, but her long-standing relationship appeared to be with the leading man, John Gilbert, whom she agreed to marry but she failed to show up for her wedding. In her retirement, during which she became increasingly reclusive, she lived in New York City. A 1986 Sidney Lumet film, Garbo Talks, reflected the continuing popular obsession with the star. Until the end of her life, Garbo-watching became a sport among the paparazzi and the media, but she remained elusive. She died in 1990.

Garbo, born Greta Lovisa Gustafsson in Stockholm, Sweden, was the youngest of three children of Karl Alfred Gustafsson, an unskilled worker, and his wife, Anna Lovisa. Greta’s older brother and sister were Sven Alfred and Alva Maria .

Grace Patricia Kelly was an American Academy Award-winning actress and Princess consort of Monaco. In April 1956 Kelly married Rainier III, Prince of Monaco, and became styled as Her Serene Highness The Princess of Monaco, and was commonly referred to as Princess Grace.

After embarking on an acting career in 1950, at the age of 20, Grace Kelly appeared in New York City theatrical productions as well as in more than forty episodes of live drama productions broadcast during the early 1950s Golden Age of Television. In October 1953, with the release of Mogambo, she became a movie star, a status confirmed in 1954 with a Golden Globe Award and Academy Award nomination as well as leading roles in five films, including The Country Girl, in which she gave a deglamorized, Academy Award-winning performance. She retired from acting at 26 to enter upon her duties in Monaco. She and Prince Rainier had three children: Caroline, Albert, and Stéphanie. She also retained her American roots, maintaining dual US and Monégasque citizenships. She died on September 14, 1982, two months before her 53rd birthday, when she lost control of her automobile and crashed after suffering a stroke. Her daughter Princess Stéphanie, who was in the car with her, survived the accident. In June 1999, the American Film Institute ranked her #13 in their list of top female stars of American cinema.

A native of Philadelphia, Grace Kelly was born to John Brendan “Jack” Kelly, and his wife, Margaret Katherine Majer. The newborn was named in memory of her father’s sister, who had died at a young age. She was raised Roman Catholic. The family lived in a house at 3901 Henry Avenue in the East Falls neighborhood of the city. Before her marriage, Margaret Majer studied physical education at Temple University and later became the first woman to head the Physical Education Department at the University of Pennsylvania. Jack Kelly was a local hero as a triple Olympic-gold-medal-winning sculler, and subsequently became a self-made millionaire, with his brick business rising to prominence as the largest such enterprise on the East Coast. Registering as a Democrat, he obtained the party’s nomination for mayor in the 1935 election and lost by the closest margin for any Democrat in the city’s electoral history. In later years, he served on the Fairmount Park Commission and, during World War II, was appointed by President Roosevelt as National Director of Physical Fitness.

When Grace was born, the Kellys already had two children, Margaret Katherine, known as Peggy and John Brendan, Jr., known as Kell. Another daughter, Elizabeth Anne, known as Lizanne, was born three-and-a-half years after Grace.

Grace Moore was an American operatic soprano and actress in musical theatre and film. She was nicknamed the “Tennessee Nightingale.” Her films helped to popularize opera by bringing it to a larger audience.

Moore was born Mary Willie Grace Moore to Richard Lawson Moore and Tessa Jane Moore in the community of Slabtown in Cocke County, Tennessee. By the time she was two years old, her family had relocated to Knoxville, a move Moore later described as traumatic, as she found urban life distateful at the time. After several years in Knoxville, the family again relocated to Jellico, Tennessee, where Moore spent her adolescence. After high school in Jellico, she studied briefly at Ward-Belmont College in Nashville before moving to Washington, D.C. and New York City to continue her musical training and begin her career. Her first paying job as a singer was at the Black Cat Cafe in Greenwich Village.

Grace Moore’s first Broadway appearance was in 1920 in the musical Hitchy-Koo, by Jerome Kern. In 1922 and 1923 she appeared in the second and third of Irving Berlin’s series of four Music Box Revues. In the 1923 edition she and John Steel introduced Berlin’s song “What’ll I Do”. When Moore sang “An Orange Grove in California,” orange blossom perfume was wafted through the theater.

In 1932 she appeared on Broadway in the short-lived operetta The DuBarry by Karl Millöcker.