8 Actors That Were So Bad They Had To Quit Movies

7. Greta Garbo - A Two-Faced Flop Leads To A Star Giving Up

Cruel Intentions
MGM

Classed by many as one of the finest actors ever committed to the big screen, Greta Garbo's stellar career - that had already racked up three Academy Award nominations over the course of a gripping decade on our cinema screens from 1930 onwards - was suddenly cut short on the back of one unexpectedly disastrous project.

Playing the part of Karin Borg Blake/Katherine Borg in George Cukor's Two-Faced Woman, the film was a clear attempt to build on the star's undoubted success in projects like Ninotchka - another rom-com that had resulted in one of Garbo's aforementioned Oscar nods.

Yet, the results weren't anywhere near as successful this time round, with critics absolutely slamming the picture that Garbo would later refer to as "my grave". On the back of such a humiliating trouncing by the reviewers, Cukor would go on record to admit that classing the film as the one that killed her career would be a "grotesque over-simplification", but he still conceded:

"It certainly threw her, but I think that what really happened was that she just gave up. She didn't want to go on."

Sure enough, she didn't, and the lacklustre Two-Faced Woman would act as this cinematic legend's final-ever movie role at just 36-years-of-age.

Contributor
Contributor

Lifts rubber and metal. Watches people flip in spandex and pretends to be other individuals from time to time...