GRETA'S WILD RIDE

She wasn't allowed the iconic doll as a kid and had to scrounge around to get one now director Greta Gerwig has turned Barbie into a movie phenomenon!

- JANICE BECKETT-MSIZA

AS A child she'd stare at the rows of Barbies in toy stores and think she'd never seen anything as beautiful.

The glossy hair, the perfect outfits, the tiny high heels it was plastic perfection in a pretty pink package.

But as much as she begged her mother to buy her one, the answer was always no. Barbie was a terrible role model for girls, her mom told her, creating false ideas of beauty and body image.

But her mother must be smiling wryly at the irony now.

Her daughter, Greta Gerwig, is the record-breaking toast of Tinseltown and it's all thanks to the movie she made about the doll she was denied.

No film in the 100-year history of Warner Bros, the production house behind Barbie, has sold so many tickets so fast.

It knocked the box-office socks off Oppenheimer, the epic movie released at the same time, which was predicted to give Greta's creation a run for its money.

Barbie became the number one film in the world, raking in the bucks to become the first movie in Hollywood history by a solo woman director to make more than $1 billion (R18 billion).

And no one is more delighted or surprised than Greta herself. "I'm so grateful," she says. "I'm so amazed. I'm at a loss for words, really. It's been amazing to walk around and see people in pink.

Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine something like this." The 40-year-old also wrote the screenplay for the movie with her partner Noah Baumbach fleshing out an idea that began in lockdown.

"There was this sense of wanting to make something anarchic and wild and completely bananas," she says. And millions of people are flocking to see her work, which has been praised for helping to rejuvenate movie houses after the chaos of Covid and the rise of streaming services.