IRENE PAPAS

(3 September 1929 - 14 September 2022)

The Greek actress Irene Papas, who has died aged 96, following Alzheimer's disease, was a much-respected theatre and cinema actor in her own country and went on to appear to great success in many international films. Her natural beauty gave her the chance to play heroines in classical Greek tragedy and her acting ability was such that she was equally at home in the plays of Euripides and Sophocles or in a Hollywood Western or an adventure film such as The Guns of Navarone, the comedy-drama Zorba the Greek, or a thriller such as Costa-Gavras’ Z. Leaving her home country during the Greek colonels’ totalitarian regime, she moved to Italy, becoming a travelling player working in Europe, Britain and the US, in a career of over fifty years.

Irene Papas was born Eirini Leleko in Chiliomodi, by Corinth in Greece. Her father, Stavros (possibly Albanian), taught classical drama in Corinth, while her mother, Eleni, was a schoolteacher. From an early age, Eirini took to acting at school and acquired her first taste of Greek classical drama from a touring company. She used to dress up in a black scarf and perform for her young friends. At the age of fifteen she joined the Royal School of Dramatic Art in Athens to study singing and dancing.

Her first stage work was in Ibsen, Shakespeare and classical Greek tragedy during the 1950s, and in the 1960s she went to New York where she acted in Dostoyevsky and Euripides and appeared at the Greek theatre in Epidaurus. Director Elia Kazan discovered Papas in Greece and in 1948 she had a part in Nikos Tsiforo's film Fallen Angels. Her role in Frixos Iliadis’ Dead City (1952) saw her at the Cannes festival where she received great publicity. Playing in the Italian films Attila and Theodora, Slave Empress found her being signed for Hollywood where she appeared in the James Cagney Western Tribute to a Bad Man (1956).

Her film career burgeoned in the US where she made The Power and the Prize with Robert Taylor and The Guns of Navarone, J. Lee Thompson’s film of the Alistair MacLean novel with Gregory Peck, David Niven and Anthony Quinn. Then Papas filmed the first of her classical Greek tragedies, Sophocles’ Antigone, directed by Yorgos Javellas, for which she won the best actress award at the Berlin film festival. Disney’s The Moonspinners, with Hayley Mills, was followed by one of her most engaging roles as the widow in Zorba the Greek with Anthony Quinn, Alan Bates and Lila Kedrova. It was directed by Michael Cacoyannis and won three Academy Awards. The director had already cast Papas in Euripides’ Electra (1962), the first of his Greek trilogy which was later followed by The Trojan Women and Iphigenia.

Irene Papas continued to appear in more films in Italy, Spain, France and the UK where she was Queen Katherine in Charles Jarrott’s Anne of a Thousand Days. Among a list of Papas’ films, Costa-Gavras’ Z (1969), Francesco Rosi’s Christ Stopped at Eboli (1979), his Chronicle of a Death Foretold (1987) and John Madden’s Captain Corelli's Mandolin (2001) are arguably the most interesting. Her many awards include the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the Venice Biennale in 2009.

In 1947 Irene Papas married the film director Alkis Papas but they divorced in 1951. From 1954 she had an affair with Marlon Brando, the great passion of her life. She also married the producer Jose Kohn in 1957, but the marriage was later annulled.

MICHAEL DARVELL