No other twentieth-century artist in or out of film so captivated the world or spent so much energy trying to hide from it. To bring her out of hiding, Barry Paris draws on a wealth of hitherto unavailable material - ranging from Garbo's drama school notebooks and her unpublished letters to an astonishing set of a hundred taped conversations, recorded during her later years in New York, as well as interviews with her surviving friends and family in Sweden and America.

Paris's biography supplants the legend of Garbo the "enigma" with a revelation of the real woman, whose grip on our imagination remains as powerful today as it was almost seventy years ago when she dazzled the world in Flesh and the Devil.