With a packed house and a completely dedicated audience, last week the most anticipated series of the year premiered within the framework of the 65th International Festival of Thessaloniki (Greece): ‘Maria who became Callas’, by the Greek director Olga Malea and the actress Cleopatra Eleftheriadu in the role of Maria Callas. The 10-episode series that will premiere at the end of the month on Ertflix, the digital platform of the Hellenic public television ERT, narrates the adventures of the young Maria Callas in Athens occupied by the Axis Forces. Maria is presented to us as a 16-year-old ‘ugly duckling’, with a face full of acne and overweight, many years before she became the greatest legend of lyrical singing of the 20th century. It is not the only work about La Divina that has been screened during the festival; The film selected to open this edition was ‘Maria’, by Chilean director Pablo Larraín, with Angelina Jolie in the role of Maria Callas. As in ‘Spencer’ and ‘Jackie’, Larraín focuses on a specific moment in La Divina’s life: September 16, 1977, the day La Callas’s voice went out forever. The film was partly filmed in the city of Pyrgos, in the Peloponnese and inside the yacht ‘Christina O’, where Maria Callas lived some of the worst moments of her gruesome love relationship with Aristotle Onassis. A year ago, within the framework of the centenary celebrations of La Divina, the Thessaloniki festival screened the documentary film ‘Maria Callas: Letters and Memoirs’, by directors Tom Volf and Yannis Dimolitsas and performed by the Italian actress Monica Bellucci, and that just two months ago it premiered in Spain at the San Sebastián Festival. The film is a chronicle of the tour of the homonymous theatrical show between November 2019 and January 2023 where, through letters and other unpublished material, it reveals to us the woman behind the icon. “As you know, I carry Greece deep in my heart,” said an emotional Monica Bellucci before a packed auditorium while collecting the Golden Alexander, the most prestigious award at the Greek festival. In his series Malea also wanted to stick to a specific moment in Maria’s life; in this case to the soprano’s lesser-known years: those that La Callas spent in Nazi-occupied Athens, between the ages of 16 and 22. Also unknown to the Greek public is Cleopatra Eleftheriadu, the actress and lyrical singing student who plays La Divina in the series. «The series came to me. They found me thanks to my conservatory teacher. “They gave me a test and they gave me the role,” the twenty-year-old girl explains to ABC, who still finds it hard to believe that in her first job as an actress she played a legend like Maria Callas. «We were clear that, for the performances to be credible, the role of Maria had to be played by an opera student because, on the one hand, a soprano dominates the posture on stage or the way of articulating the mouth when performing. sing and, on the other hand, the actress had to be of a similar age to Maria, who was 16 years old when the Germans occupied Athens,” explains director Malea. The filmmaker discovered this facet of the soprano about seven years ago when ‘The Unknown Callas’ fell into her hands, a book of almost a thousand pages in which the writer Nicholas Petsalis-Diomidis collects the testimonies of people who shared academic, professional or relatives with the soprano during the years she lived in Athens. “I was fascinated by that ugly duckling that Maria was before she became a diva with international projection.” Real settings “We who live in Athens have an advantage that other producers do not have: we can film here, but not anywhere, but in the places where Maria Callas lived,” says the director of the series. Among the places where the series was filmed, the apartment located at number 61 Patision Street, in the heart of the city of Atenas, stands out, where the diva lived with her sister and mother and which, in the coming months, will open again. new its doors as a singing academy with the name of the soprano; in the building of the old conservatory of Atenas, where Maria Callas received classes from Elvira de Hidalgo – today converted into a Temporary Reception Center for Immigrants -, and at the Teatro Olimpia, where the soprano performed the operas that brought her fame, that still haunts her today. Malea offers us a very different story from what we are used to: the metamorphosis of the soprano and the story of her difficult beginnings trapped in an Athens devastated by war and in the difficult relationship with her toxic and controlling parent, Evangelia (Litsa) Dimitriadu , -played by the established Greek actress Eleni Rantu- and who in the series shows very marked traits of the classic Greek mother that turn her into an almost comical character. Malea’s story is, without a doubt, the most Greek Callas shown so far and will surely conquer the hearts of the Hellenic public.
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