Top-up fees, due to be introduced next year, have neutralised the extra cost. Moreover, top-ranking US universities are frequently able to offer significant financial support.The interest from British students increased by 1.5 per cent last year, despite the impact of America’s invasion of Iraq and the so-called war on terror, which are considered to be the major contributing factors in a 28 per cent overall decline in numbers of foreign students applying to the US.Steve Lay, the executive officer of the London office for Monash University, one of Australia’s leading institutions, said: “The top-up fees are going to go up. People are thinking that if they are going to have to pay something, they are going to look at all the options, here, in the US, in Europe, or wherever.”Studying abroad, particularly in America, was seen as a luxury for all but the most well-off families. And we can’t ignore the introduction of fees in British institutions. Australian universities have also seen admissions from UK students rise by more than eight per cent in two years.”It’s constantly going up,” Anthony Nemecek, the director of the USEAS, said of the surge of interest from Britain “It’s been quite staggering. In the UK she would have studied physics from the start: in the US the students do a range of subjects, only specialising later – a real attraction for many.The trend is now prompting warnings of a “brain drain” of Britain’s most academically gifted students.

I did consider Oxford and Cambridge, but it was never a big ambition to go there.”Ms Graciawent to Cyfarthfa High School, a state school in Merthyr Tydfil, where she took maths, further maths, physics and chemistry A-levels. Inquiries from British students seeking to study in America have tripled in the past three years, according to the London-based US Education Advisory Service (USEAS). Clarence Brown, who directed her in many of her greatest films, said: “Garbo had something behind the eyes that you couldn’t see until you photographed it in close-up.”Garbo was ferociously stubborn. She was one of the few actresses who regularly faced down Mayer in contract negotiations.

“This girl in her early twenties took on one of the toughest moguls in Hollywood and won That could make a film in itself,” Brownlow says Her contemporaries regarded her with undisguised awe. To drum up interest in her, MGM’s publicists were reduced to photographing her alongside lions and college athletes. But when the studio finally gave her a role in The Torrent (1926), Mayer and Co quickly realised her potential At the very least, she was a fine actress. At the end of 1926 came her breakthrough, Flesh and the Devil, in which she played the femme fatale opposite John Gilbert. She and Gilbert were smitten with one another: when they kissed, they kissed for real.The directors who worked with Garbo invariably talked about some inscrutable quality she possessed.

It helped that in William H Daniels, who quickly became known as “Garbo’s cameraman”, she had a cinematographer who knew just how to capture those luminous and often mournful close-ups with which all her films are filled. Instead she is one of the growing numbers rejecting the UK’s cash-strapped higher education system and heading for the States.
Five years after the state-school student Laura Spence became a cause c?bre – she went to Harvard following a high-profile rejection by Oxford – thousands are following in her wake to study abroad, lured by world-class teaching, generous financial support and facilities that British-based students can only dream of.The number of Britons opting to study at the real Ivy League universities in the US has doubled in the past eight years – Harvard now has around 200 – and with UK student debt rising and tuition fees about to soar, the trend is certain to continue. But the 18-year-old does not have a place at Oxford, Cambridge, Imperial or any other of Britain’s “ivy league” colleges. Dominique Gracia is a top student by anyone’s standards. She has As in four of the hardest subjects available and is about to start a degree course at one of the world’s leading universities. The real difference is that I don’t manufacture an environment. These people are simply living their lives.” Simon O’Hagan’49 Up’ is on ITV1 on Thursday at 9pm.