Melina Mercouri ΜΕΛΙΝΑ ΜΕΡΚΟΥΡΗ
Born
October 1920 Died March 1994
Plaza, Number
66
Melina Mercouri led a life that was ‘larger than
life’. She is perhaps most famous for her role in Never on Sunday. The
subsequent Broadway hit Illya Darling made her even better known in North
America. She was in New York when a military Junta took over in Greece on April
21, 1967, an event that would bring her into direct confrontation with the
colonels and their regime. In retaliation, they stripped her of her
citizenship. When democracy returned 1974, going into politics under the banner
of Andreas Papandreau’s PASOK party and later becoming the Minister of Culture (1981) seemed like a natural
progression for Melina, a woman who was equally at home on the the
sound stage or the political one.
It all began (dates vary according to
sources) in the home of her beloved grandfather, Spyros Mercouris, who just happened to
be the mayor of Athens.
Her Life
Melina was born Maria Amalia Mercouri into a political family.
The family home teemed with the entire Athenian world that counted then, and many
ordinary folk who didn’t. Her
grandfather gave her the nickname “Melina” meaning “little honey” and forgave
even her most atrocious behavior. He once commented that she could have been
anything she wanted to be – if only she had been born a boy.
http://1klik-aristera.blogspot.gr/2010_03_01_archive.html
Melina would prove that bit of male chauvinism wrong
with a vengeance! She had learned early that her mother and grandmother ‘knew’
their place in a male dominated society. Her way out of this reality into one more
congenial? She would become a stage actress, a career that middle class
families then would not have wanted for their daughters. This may have been what propelled her into an
early marriage at the age of 16 with the wealthy playboy and somewhat enigmatic
Panos Harokopos (Πάνος Χαροκόπας), a
man many years her senior.
This is the only image of Panos Harokopos we found.
He was prepared to offer her the freedom to do as she
wished. As she put it: I was married. I was free ( Ήμουν παντρεμένη. Ήμουν ελεύθερη) What
exactly the quid pro quo was has stayed between them. They would eventually
divorce but remained friends. Melina seems to have stayed on good terms with all of the many men in her life and not
one of them has written a tell-tale autobiography, an interesting tribute all
by itself.
After this
marriage, she enrolled in the Drama School of the National Theatre of Greece where she studied for three years. Her first success was as Lavinia Mannon in O’Neill’s
Mourning
becomes Electra; she compounded that success in Karolos Koun’s
production of A Streetcar Named Desire. During those years, the young Melina was far more
interested in becoming the next Marika Kotopouli than in following political
events. She seems to have sailed through the Metaxas era and into the much more
frightening era of the second world war relatively unscathed(1) and, if her
relationship during that period with a lover who was an alleged criminal and
German collaborator caused her to be in serious
danger during the German occupation and after, we do not hear much about it.
These connections and the favours they brought
(simply being left alone would have been one of them) did allow her to house
and feed her starving acting colleagues. She was shocked by the horrible ‘execution’ of fellow actress EleniPapadaki at the hands of the communists. Eleni had been accused of collaboration with the quisling government. (2)
She would become popular in France where she lived for
some time. The 1955 Michael Cacoyiannis
film Stella won her fame and accolades. Stella
won the Golden Globe in Cannes in 1956 as the best foreign film. How could it
miss with him as director, music by Manos Hadjidakis and Vassilis Tsitsanis, her
amazing acting and her husky voice? She
was 35; it was her film debut.
The famous song from the film:
Her international career began to take off after she
met and eventually married (1965) film maker Jules Dassin. With him she made the
1960 hit Never on Sunday, the film that would make her known the world
over.
In her autobiography she tells us that when the
military Junta took over Greece in 1967, she felt that it was at a time in her
life when she should make a stand and resist. When they stripped her of her citizenship, it
only galvanized her and Dassin into greater resistance efforts. Her famous
remark about Stylianos Pattakou, the then Minister of the Interior, would
become immortalized in the title of her autobiography “I was Born a Greek”. She
famously remarked: “You were born a fascist and will die a fascist; I was born
a Greek and will die a Greek”.
It is impossible not to like her. She was openly self-centered, couldn’t stand being alone, but was generous, and, even
as a politician, had a way of speaking plain common sense when others indulged
in platitudes. Her championship of the return of the Parthenon marbles is one of her lasting legacies. After she died,
her husband set up the Melina Mercouri Foundation
to continue that struggle and to support the Arts in her name.
She once narrated a television special on the city of Athens which really struck a chord and not just because it was an excellent documentary. Towards the end of the hour, she stood in front of her family’s tomb in the First Cemetery, expressing her love for the city and saying with real pride that she too would be buried right there, as if being buried in her city and with her family was the most fitting and best epitaph she could ever want.
And then there
was an interview on Greek television after her lung cancer diagnosis, where she
spoke vivaciously and smoked continuously throughout the entire program – even although,
this time, it was Charon holding the ‘knife’.
She died in 1994.
Her epitaph on the family tomb.
Thousands attended her funeral, threw flowers and
applauded. An English friend and stage
designer, watching this procession to the cemetery, would later write that it
was the first time he really understood what it meant to be Greek.(3)
See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C1xBw4tt9qU
Footnotes
(2) No
one emerged from this period unscathed. Melina claimed that she helped the
resistance with money she acquired and her father opposed the regime. Her
uncle, on the other hand, was a collaborator of the quisling Prime Minister
Rallis. Divided loyalties were a fact of life for most Greek families at that
time.
(3) This
was Roy Hodges, who claimed he always recognized ‘great theatre’ whenever he saw it.
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