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“Never on Sunday” star Melina Mercouri rose from being an actress with a worldwide following to being Greece’s most famous Minister of Culture.
Profession: Actress, Politician
Country of Origin: Greece
Country of Asylum: United States of America
Date of birth: 18 October 1925
She was born into a family of politicians. Her grandfather, Spyros Mercouris, was once the mayor of Athens and her mother, Stamatis Mercouris, was a Member of Parliament in the Greek Democratic Left party and a former Minister of Public Works and Order. “I think that I was a political animal from when I was a very young girl, and I drank the political milk from my mother,” she once said.
After finishing her secondary education, she gained admission to the National Theatre’s Drama School in Athens. She graduated in 1944 and enrolled in the National Theatre. In 1945, she played Electra in Eugene O’Neil’s “Mourning Becomes Electra”, but her breakthrough performance is considered to be as Blanche Dubois in a 1949 production of Tennessee Williams’ “A Streetcar Named Desire”. Thereafter she appeared in plays by Aldous Huxley, Arthur Miller and others. In 1953, she was awarded the Marika Kotopouli prize for her work in theatre, which included performances in 60 plays.
She returned to Greece in 1955 after several years in Paris. Her first film performance, in Michalis Cacoyannis’ “Stella”, received much attention at the Cannes Film Festival in 1956, and many film roles followed. Among these were several by American filmmaker Jules Dassin, whom she met that year in Cannes and later married. Their collaborations included “He Who Must Die”, “The Law”, “Phaedra, Topkapi” and, most famously, “Never on Sunday”. The latter won five Oscar nominations, and at the Cannes Film Festival, Mercouri won the Best Actress award for her performance.
Off stage, Mercouri became involved in efforts to liberate Greece from the regime of The Colonels, who staged a military coup in 1967. She was in the United States performing in “Illya Darling” at the time of the coup, a role which became difficult for her to play: “I loath playing Illya. Because it is a lie. There is no happiness in Greece today. It is a country in chains.” When asked her opinion about continued American tourism in Greece at the time, she was equally blunt in her response: “If you want your dollars to support a fascist government, then go to Greece.” Such comments made her deeply unpopular with the Greek dictatorship.
She records the consequences of her outspokenness in her autobiography titled “I was Born Greek”: “Early on the 12th of July 1967, the phone rang. That sound. It was a journalist calling from England. ‘Ms Mercouri, the Greek Minister of the Interior has declared you an enemy of the Greek people. Your property will be confiscated and you will be deprived of your Greek citizenship. Do you have any comment?’ For a moment I couldn’t speak, then words came: ‘I was born a Greek, I will die a Greek. Mr Patakos was born a fascist. He will die a fascist.’ Hours passed until my anger subsided. I swore to fight them till I die.”
She travelled extensively to lead and publicise international campaigns against the junta, escaping an attempt on her life during a stage performance in Italy. She returned to Greece in 1974 when the junta collapsed and launched a career in politics, which culminated in eight years of service as Minister of Culture. During her term, she initiated the campaign for the return of the Parthenon sculptures known as the Elgin Marbles, which now reside in the British Museum.
Mercouri died on March 6, 1994 at New York’s Memorial Hospital. In London, The Guardian correspondent, Helena Smith, described the reaction in Greece: “Death has cast a shadow across Greece. ‘Melina, Melina, Melina, where’s our Melina,’ wept a middle-aged man. ‘She lives in your soul, in the soul of all of us,’ responded a tall blonde woman trying hard to comfort him.”
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