Running the Gamut With Garbo : The county Museum of Art will show all but two of the screen legend’s American films during monthlong memorial.

Garbo stars!

Less than six months after her death on April 15, the legendary actress is being honored by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art Film Department with a showing of all but two of her American films, including such rarely screened silents as “The Temptress” and “Wild Orchids.”

Among the rarities to be shown: the alternative ending of “Love,” her silent version of “Anna Karenina.” In this version--story by Tolstoy, additional dialogue by Frances Marion and Lorna Moon--Anna is spared the train and reunited with Vronsky.

According to Ron Haver, head of the film department, Greta Garbo was unique in her ability to continue to fascinate audiences, many of whom have never actually seen a Garbo picture.

Unlike such once famous contemporaries as Norma Shearer, Garbo was able to remain in the public consciousness long after she left the screen. “It’s amazing,” he says. “Here’s someone who hasn’t made a film in 50 years and she’s still as well known as she was in her heyday.”

As Haver notes, Garbo would have been 85 on Sept. 18. Since the museum’s earlier Garbo retrospective in 1982, Turner Entertainment Co., which owns the MGM film library, has made first-rate prints of a number of her films, he says.

“Camille”--probably her best work--and “Grand Hotel” are available on videotape, and “Queen Christina” turns up regularly on Turner television, but Garbo films are not easy to find. Moreover, they are best seen in a theater. Of all the Hollywood greats, she “suffers most from diminution of image,” Haver says. “She needs the magic of a dark theater and the shared experience of an audience.”

The Swedish-born actress spent her entire American career at MGM, where she made “The Torrent” in 1925. In one of the great make-overs of all time, MGM engineered her cool, androgynous look. The studio made her lose weight (horseback riding was prescribed), straightened her teeth, tamed her tresses, sculpted her hairline, buried the flaws in her skin under makeup and transformed her eyes, with their long, long lashes, into the focal point of her remarkable face.

Garbo’s eyes were crucial to her charisma. Clarence Brown, who directed her in “Flesh and the Devil,” “Anna Christie” and other films, once said he routinely didn’t see the magic quality of her work when he was actually filming her on the set. He couldn’t tell whether he had captured what he wanted until he saw the rushes. Then he would see it in her eyes.

“She was able to project her thoughts through her eyes without saying a word,” Haver says.

Garbo was never a big moneymaker for MGM (her films always made more overseas than domestically). “She was a prestige attraction,” he says. She was a large enough presence to hold her own in MGM’s opulent historical dramas, and nobody matched her when it came to expiring. She died in half a dozen pictures. “There is no tragic heroine like Garbo,” Haver says. “She staked that territory out for herself very early, and she never gave it up to anybody.”

Women especially responded to her films. “Men were kind of indifferent to her,” he says. “She was a little too remote for guys, and mysterious. You saw there wasn’t much that got by her.”

Although she dominated men on screen, the young Garbo had a gift for finding men to mentor her.

Swedish director Mauritz Stiller lovingly oversaw her career both in Europe and during her early years in America. He once asked one of her co-stars to wear larger shoes so Garbo’s feet wouldn’t look so big. And she was a favorite of MGM wunderkind Irving Thalberg.

As Haver points out, Garbo talked only when Thalberg was good and ready. She made two silents long after the rest of Hollywood was heavily invested in voice coaches. Thalberg personally chose “Anna Christie” for her sound debut, shrewdly casting her as a former prostitute with a Swedish accent. Audiences loved it when she growled: “Gimme a viskey--ginger ale on the side. And don’t be stingy, baby.”

During the decades of her stardom, Garbo had remarkable clout for an actress, Haver says. She nixed cheesecake photos early on. When filming, she quit promptly at 5 o’clock, the moment marked by the appearance of her maid with a cup of tea. She insisted on being billed simply as Garbo. Indeed she was so powerful that her rejection of Laurence Olivier for “Queen Christina” set his Hollywood career back years.

When she lost control of her career in 1942, she walked away from it. Her last film, “Two-Faced Woman,” was a bomb, despite her proven ability as a comedian and direction by George Cukor. Although Garbo was only 36, hers was not a particularly truncated career for a performer of the period, in Haver’s view. “That’s a good long run,” he says. Garbo was always a shrewd businesswoman, and Haver speculates she realized that World War II had changed the movies forever and that Hollywood would no longer be making her kind of film.

Haver confesses that he twice violated Garbo’s famous desire to be alone.

“I used to follow her in New York,” he says.

One time he had spent the entire day looking at Garbo’s face as he was going through stills from “Anna Karenina” for his book, “David O. Selznick’s Hollywood.” Afterward he ran into a shop to buy fruit. He looked up and there, looking in, was that face.

Haver dropped his apple, ran out and followed her for blocks.

She finally hailed a cab.

The Garbo festival begins Friday with afternoon and evening showings of “Camille” and “The Torrent.” It continues through Oct. 6. The films will be shown in the Leo S. Bing Theater at the museum, 5905 Wilshire Blvd. For further information, call (213) 857-6010.