How Greta Garbo Got Her Name
Research for my February 2026 book Greta Garbo and the Rise of the Modern Woman revealed some amazing facts. Here is one.
How did Greta Gustafson become Greta Garbo?
Several people have offered up stories about her change from the most ordinary of Swedish family names to the distinctive Garbo. Now, the true story of the Garbo name is revealed.
Why change?
Changing one’s name to a stage name has a long tradition. It can add distinctiveness, or flair. The Gustafson name would not set her apart. Sometimes one’s birth name is too distinct. Jewish performers in America often anglicized their names. So Hedwig Kiesler became Hedy Lamarr.
Choosing a name that is culturally unique also implies that you believe you can deliver a performance worthy of being marked as unique. As we shall see, Garbo believed.
Stories told by others
Garbo never discussed where the Garbo name came from. To the public it just appeared with the release of Gösta Berling, the 1924 Mauritz Stiller film that made her a star.
Several people offered up their versions of how it transpired.
Arthur Nordén would say that it flowed from a discussion he had with Stiller. According to him Stiller wanted her to have a more international name. He responded by suggesting Gábor, and the name evolved from there to Garbo.
Nordén had co-written some earlier Stiller screenplays. By Gösta Berling their partnership was three years in the past. It is unclear why Stiller would have discussed this with him.
Mimi Pollak, who was a student in her class at Dramaten, would also tell her version. According to Pollak the two of them were walking to the office where the name change would be initiated, pondering alternatives. The idea that Garbo was committed to changing her name and had arranged for her mother to be present to sign the petition as she was still minor, while not yet knowing what that name would be seems unlikely. A further point is that the other witness on the name change petition is that of a different Dramaten student, Mona Martenson, not Pollak.
What the record shows
For decades key documents that show the truth lay undiscovered in a Swedish archive. The Music and Theatre Library in Stockholm is often overlooked by film researchers. Back in the 1920s there wasn’t much of a line between film and theatre. People went back and forth on different projects. There I found two documents that show Garbo was Garbo much earlier than commonly thought.
Gustaf Molander was the director of the Dramaten school. He was the man who admitted Garbo and oversaw her education. Elements of the theatre part of his career reside in the Music and Theatre Library. He also had a significant film career which is chronicled in the Swedish film archive.
He kept a notebook each year to gather together information on the schoolteachers and students. In the notebook for the school year 1922/23, Garbo’s first year, on the page where he first lists out the new students, she listed as Greta Garbo [Gustafson]. Garbo is the name she began using at the very beginning of her theatre career.
Interestingly, on later pages where Molander is assigning students to roles he reverses the order. She is listed as Greta Gustafson [Garbo]
![A close up of a single entry from the datebook of Ragnar Hyltén-Cavillius in which he notes that Greta Gustafson [Garbo] is "unimaginably pretty."](https://scottreisfield.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/230823-RHC-datebook-scaled.jpg "230823 RHC datebook")
Six weeks later, on September 18, her birthday, when he recorded her name in his datebook, it is as Greta Garbo.
The legal name change
Why did Garbo wait until November 9 to apply for a legal name change to Greta Garbo? Prior to Gösta Berling there was no need to formally change her name. She was just a student. Even though she was using Garbo, film publicity continued to use Gustafson. She was only mentioned in a few articles during production, it was as Greta Gustafson. By changing her name to Garbo before the film was released, now she was referred to as Greta Garbo in all the publicity.
Greta Garbo named herself.
Gustafson or Gustafsson?
People have written Garbo’s birth name as either ‘Gustafson’ or ‘Gustafsson.’ The answer is revealed in her petition.
Swedish last names for the working-class were created at the turn of the century. Before that, you were just named after your father. Greta would have been Greta Karlsdotter. If she was a boy, it would have been Greta Karlsson, with the double letter ‘s.’ More modern thinking Swedes dropped one letter ‘s.’ That wasn’t recognized by the bureaucracy of that time. Today both versions of Swedish last names co-exist.
On Garbo’s petition for her name change the bureaucrat writes her name as Greta Gustafsson. Below that, she confidently signs her old name with a single ‘s,’ Greta Gustafson. Her mother Anna also signs her name with a single ‘s.’
