Irene Papas

Irene Papas: The Face of Greek Tragedy

In *Zorba the Greek*, she plays a widow the village decides to punish, and she does most of it without lines — a woman walking toward her own killing with her chin level. It was 1964, and it fixed Irene Papas in the world's imagination as something older than cinema. Over five decades and more than seventy films she became, in the director Manoel de Oliveira's phrase, "this great tragedienne, the image of Greece of all time." She had rebelled against her drama school for teaching her to be stylised.

Chiliomodi

She was born Eirini Lelekou on 3 September in the village of Chiliomodi, near Corinth. Sources disagree on the year: Greek records and her Wikipedia entry give 1929, making her 93 at her death, while the *Washington Post* obituary gives 1926 and 96. Her mother, Eleni Prevezanou, was a schoolteacher; her father, Stavros Lelekos, taught classical drama. The pairing is almost too neat for a life spent between village Greece and Aeschylus. The family moved to Athens when she was seven.

The Student Who Argued

From the age of fifteen she trained at the drama school of the National Theatre of Greece, studying dance and singing alongside acting, and finishing her studies in 1948 — an education completed under and around the deprivations of the war years. She was not a docile pupil. She resisted the school's formal, stylised approach to performance, an instinct that turned out to be her whole method: where the tradition wanted declamation, she wanted stillness.

She began in 1948 in Greek variety and traditional theatre, working through Ibsen, Shakespeare and the Greek tragedians, and moved into film in 1951. International notice came at Cannes in 1952 for *Dead City*. In 1954 the Italian studio Lux Film signed her, and she spent the middle fifties in costume spectacle — *Attila*, *Theodora, Slave Empress* — the kind of work that pays for the work that matters.

Cacoyannis

What matters began with Michael Cacoyannis. Their collaboration produced the run of films that made her the leading figure in the cinematic transcription of ancient tragedy: *Electra* in 1962, *The Trojan Women* in 1971, where she played Helen opposite Katharine Hepburn and Vanessa Redgrave, and *Iphigenia* in 1977, where she played Clytemnestra. She had already taken the title role in *Antigone* in 1961, winning the Berlin Film Festival's best actress prize; *Electra* brought the same award at Thessaloniki in 1962, and *The Trojan Women* the National Board of Review's best actress citation in 1971.

She understood exactly what these parts were for. "The heroine represents an idea," she said — "a revolutionist, a partisan, someone that goes against tyranny." It is a description of Antigone, and it is also a description of the political position she would soon be forced into.

The Widow, the Partisan, the Queen

Papas was never confined to Greece. She was the hardened partisan Maria in *The Guns of Navarone* (1961) and Catherine of Aragon in *Anne of the Thousand Days* (1969). In Costa-Gavras's *Z* (1969) she played the widow of the assassinated deputy, a performance built almost entirely out of contained grief, in a film that indicted the Greek colonels while they were still in power. She was Hind bint Utbah in *The Message* (1976), Drosoula in *Captain Corelli's Mandolin* (2001), and Helena in Oliveira's *A Talking Picture* (2003), her last screen role.

On stage in New York she played *Iphigenia in Aulis* at Circle in the Square in 1968, *Medea* on Broadway in 1973 — the critic Clive Barnes called her "a very fine, controlled Medea," and the second adjective is the more revealing — and *The Bacchae* in 1980. In 1985 she performed *Electra* in the ancient theatre at Epidaurus, which is the closest thing her profession offers to coming home.

The Fourth Reich

When the colonels seized power in 1967, Papas called for a cultural boycott of Greece and named the regime the Fourth Reich. She went into exile in Italy and New York, alongside the composer Mikis Theodorakis, and did not return until the junta fell in 1974. Thereafter she divided her life between Athens, Rome, and the village house at Chiliomodi.

A Voice as Well as a Face

She sang, and seriously. In 1968 RCA released *Songs of Theodorakis*, eleven Greek songs. In 1972 she supplied the chanted vocals on the track "∞" for Aphrodite's Child's album *666*. That connection led to two records with Vangelis: *Odes* (1979), with lyrics co-written with Arianna Stassinopoulos, and *Rapsodies* (1986), settings of Byzantine liturgical hymns. Reissuing them, the archivist Jonny Trunk wrote that there was "no doubting the power, fire and earthy delights of Papas' voice." The instrument that made her tragedies work was not only her face.

Why Irene Is Called a Genius

The claim for Papas rests on interpretive and physical craft rather than on intellect, and it should be stated that way. What she possessed was a capacity to play the archetype rather than the individual — to stand on screen as Grief, or Vengeance, or Greece, without collapsing into either abstraction or melodrama. The technique was subtractive. She stripped out the gesture, the emphasis, the actorly signalling her drama school had tried to install, and left a face and a bearing that audiences filled in themselves. Barnes's word "controlled" for her Medea, and de Oliveira's "the image of Greece of all time," are describing the same thing from different angles: a performer who achieved monumentality by doing less. Her own account was characteristically unmystical — whether stage or film, she said, "you always use the same soul."

The honest counter-case is one she made herself. "Sometimes I think I should simply stop acting," she once said. "I keep repeating my same skills in film after film." It is a fair charge. Her range was deliberately narrow; she played widows, mothers and queens in mourning for fifty years, and the qualities that made her definitive in Cacoyannis also made her interchangeable in lesser hands. She wrote no theory, directed no significant body of work, and founded no school. What she had was not originality of mind but an unusually exact command of stillness — rarer, in its way, and much harder to teach.

Legacy

The honours arrived steadily: Commander of the Greek Order of the Phoenix, Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres in France, Commander of Spain's Civil Order of Alfonso X the Wise, a lifetime Golden Arrow at the Hamptons in 1993, jury president at Venice in 1987, and in 2009 both the Venice Biennale's Leone d'oro for career achievement and a lifetime award at Cairo. In 2017 it was announced that the National Theatre's drama school — the one she had argued with as a teenager — would move to a new home named the Irene Papas–Athens School.

She had been living with Alzheimer's disease since 2013, cared for at her niece's house in Kifissia, and she died in Athens on 14 September 2022. She was buried in the cemetery at Chiliomodi, in the village where she started.

Achievements

• Knight Commander of the Order of Alfonso X
• Worked as actor, singer and film director