Halliwell explains the film’s famous final scene, when Garbo sails away having lost everything:

‘Many years later I learned that the director’s trick was to persuade her to empty her mind of all thoughts, so that each member of the audience could interpret the Sphinx-like expression to his or her own satisfaction.’

Garbo rejected Laurence Olivier as a co-star for Queen Christina and insisted on John Gilbert, whose career was on the slide at the time, mostly due to his alcoholism.  Gilbert would make one further film after Christina before dying of a heart attack in 1936, at the age of 40.