The heroine of an ancient tragedy - Newspaper Kommersant No. 170 (7371) of 09/15/2022

The heroine of an ancient tragedy - Newspaper Kommersant No. 170 (7371) of 09/15/2022



Greek actress Irene Papas has died at the age of 96. In the 20th century, which gave rise to so many tragedies that art broke under their weight and turned them into a tragic farce, Papas not only carried the banner of ancient tragedy, she lived in her world and knew no other.

The actress was often photographed in profile next to Greek sculptures, as if the gods themselves had bestowed on her a tall, powerful stature, the appearance of a Mediterranean beauty with white skin, long black hair, dark brown eyes, thick arched eyebrows and a straight nose. Plus a beautiful voice, acting talent, strong character and adventurous spirit.

She was born near Corinth in the family of a teacher who taught ancient drama. After a touring theater visited the village and showed a Greek tragedy with women tearing their hair out, the girl tied a black scarf around her head and performed in front of other children. After studying at the Royal School of Dramatic Art in Athens, she found her acting style old-fashioned and began to look for her own. Very young, she flashed on the stages of Athens theaters: she not only played in the plays of Shakespeare, Ibsen and in ancient Greek tragedies, but also danced and sang. Subsequently, she performed on Broadway in Dostoevsky's The Idiot, Medea and Iphigenia in Aulis, and in 1985 she played Elektra in the Ancient Theater of Epidaurus.

In parallel, her film career developed. In 1951, Papas was noticed and appreciated in the Greek film The Dead City. She began acting in Italy, then in American films, the most famous being The Guns of Navarone and The Trojan Women. The latter is the only example when they tried to give her image a touch of Hollywood glamour. The image itself was neither sexualized nor glamorous, which made the overseas career of a "Greek woman of sublime beauty with a transcendent quality" problematic. She was associated not with melodrama, not with sex, but with pathos and passion of the highest order.

The actress herself said best of all about her relationship with Hollywood: “I never won an Oscar ... and Irene Papas never won an Oscar.”

She became great by playing in films based on ancient plots. The best of them is Elektra by Michalis Kakoyannis. The ascetic beauty of this picture of retribution culminates in the scene where Elektra-Papas throws her cut locks at the feet of her father's killers. Her face, distorted by anger and pain, is one of the icons of cinema, not only Greek.

Her other masterpiece is Antigone, although the film itself, directed by Georgos Zavellas, suffers from the stamps of a second-rate costume movie: pasted beards, cardboard scenery. But the mournful tragic face of Irene Papas wins props. The driving force of this image is not the heroine's love for Haemon, but, again, retribution, a curse laid on her shoulders.

In Kakoyannis' Zorba the Greek, the most famous "Greek" film produced in Hollywood, starring the American Anthony Quinn, Papas is in charge of authenticity. Her heroine has no name, she is simply called the Widow, the eyes of men stick to her, and the village neighbors hate and despise her. A stern woman, as if emerging from an ancient tragedy, is powerless in the face of surging love. And, as in ancient tragedy, weakness costs her life.

I also believed in these images because in real life Papas was the same - uncompromising and inflexible. When the “black colonels” came to power in Greece in 1967, the actress left the country and called for a cultural boycott of the “Fourth Reich,” as she called the Greek junta. She later starred in Costa-Gavras' film Zeta, an angry political denunciation of the junta. And the most recent was her role in Manuel di Oliveira's Conversation Film, where Papas, along with Stefania Sandrelli and Catherine Deneuve, embodied the "cultural cream of the Mediterranean."

The life of Irene Papas, like her heroines, was full of dramatic events and strong passions.

According to her confession, she experienced the strongest with Marlon Brando, with whom she had a long-term relationship - first secret love, then friendship. In addition to her theatrical and cinematic career, she did not leave her musical career for decades. In 1968, Papas released a solo album of songs by Mikis Theodorakis, later collaborated with Greek rock bands, with Vangelis, recorded folk songs with electronic music, Byzantine liturgical hymns.

For the past nine years, Irene Papas has suffered from Alzheimer's disease. She died in her native Greek land - in the same village of Chiliomodi in the Peloponnese, in which she was born almost a century ago.

Andrey Plakhov



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