Peer Gynt figure quite so exuberant, outrageous, vitalistic as Peer Gynt. He merely "seems" initially to be an unlikely candidate for such eminence: "What is he", we say, "except a kind of Norwegian roaring boy?" – marvelously attractive to women, a kind of bogus poet, a narcissist, absurd self-idolator, a liar, seducer, bombastic self-deceiver. But this is paltry moralizing – all too much like the scholarly chorus that rants against Falstaff. True, Peer, unlike Falstaff, is not a great wit. But in the Yahwistic, biblical sense, Peer the scamp bears the blessing: More life. On 5 January 1867 Ibsen wrote to Frederik
Greta Gynt Is a Woman" (1957) and the lead in "Morning Call" (1957), and "The Crowning Touch" (1959). Gynt had a support role in "Bluebeard's Ten Honeymoons" (1959). Her last film was a Columbia Pictures release, "The Runaway" 1963 (released 1966) in which she played the lead. Reportedly, she adopted the name Gynt after she heard a pianist playing Edvard Grieg's "Peer Gynt Suite" in a hotel in London in the late 1930s. In her 1938 radio interview with NRK she states her husband exclaimed "What's this?" and her name was born. Gynt was married four times. Her last husband was Frederick