Melina Mercouri

Maria Amalia "Melina" Mercouri (Greek: Μαρία Αμαλία "Μελίνα" Μερκούρη, 18 October 1920[lower-alpha 1] – 6 March 1994) was a Greek actress, singer, and politician. She received an Academy Award nomination and won a Cannes Film Festival Award for her performance in the 1960 film Never on Sunday. Mercouri was also nominated for three Golden Globes and two BAFTA Awards in her acting career.

Melina Mercouri MP
Minister for Culture
In office 13 October 1993 – 6 March 1994
Prime Minister	Andreas Papandreou
Preceded by	Dora Bakoyanni
Succeeded by	Thanos Mikroutsikos
In office 21 October 1981 – 2 July 1989
Prime Minister	Andreas Papandreou
Preceded by	Andreas Andrianopoulos
Succeeded by	Anna Psarouda-Benaki
Member of the Hellenic Parliament for Piraeus B
In office 20 November 1977 – 6 March 1994
Personal details
Born	Maria Amalia Mercouri (1920-10-18)18 October 1920 Athens, Greece
Died	6 March 1994(1994-03-06) (aged 73) Upper East Side, New York City, U.S.
Resting place	First Cemetery of Athens
Political party	PASOK
Spouse(s)	Panos Harokopos ​ ( m. 1941; div. 1962) Jules Dassin ​ ( m. 1966; her death 1994)
Parents	Stamatis Mercouris Irene Lappa
Alma mater	National Theatre of Greece Drama School
Melina Mercouri Occupation Actress Singer Years active 1945–1977

As a politician, she was a member of the PASOK and the Hellenic Parliament. In October 1981, Mercouri became the first female Minister of Culture and Sports.

Early life

Mercouri was born in 1920 to a former cavalry officer and member of the Greek parliament, Stamatis Mercouris, and his wife, Eirini Lappa. When she completed her secondary education, she attended the National Theatre's Drama School, graduating in 1944. Mercouri's first husband was a wealthy landowner, Panos Harokopos; the couple divorced in 1962.

As an actress, Mercouri made her film debut in Stella (1955) and met international success with her performances in Never on Sunday (1960, with future husband Jules Dassin), Phaedra, Topkapi, and Promise at Dawn. She won the award for Best Actress at the 1960 Cannes Film Festival (which she shared with Jeanne Moreau for her performance in Seven Days...Seven Nights). She was nominated for an Academy Award, a Tony Award, three Golden Globe Awards, and two BAFTA Awards.

A political activist during the Greek military junta of 1967–1974, Mercouri became a member of the Hellenic Parliament in 1977 and became the first female Minister for Culture of Greece in 1981. In 1983, Mercouri proposed the programme of the European Capital of Culture, which was established by the European Union in 1985.

Mercouri was a strong advocate for the return to Athens of the Parthenon Marbles, which were removed from the Parthenon, and are now displayed in the British Museum in London.[1]

Acting career

Early years on stage

After her graduation, Mercouri joined the National Theatre of Greece and played the role of Electra in Eugene O'Neill's play Mourning Becomes Electra in 1945. In 1949, she had her first major success in the theatre playing Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire, written by Tennessee Williams and staged by Karolos Koun's Art Theatre. Until 1950, she also worked in the same theatre in other plays by Aldous Huxley, Arthur Miller and André Roussin.

Mercouri then moved to Paris, where she appeared in boulevard plays by Jacques Deval and Marcel Achard, and met famous French playwrights and novelists such as Jean Cocteau, Jean-Paul Sartre, Colette and Françoise Sagan. In 1953, Mercouri received the Marika Kotopouli Prize.

Mercouri returned to Greece in 1955. At the Kotopouli-Rex Theatre, Mercouri starred in Macbeth by William Shakespeare and L'Alouette by Jean Anouilh.

International success

Melina Mercouri in Phaedra, 1962

Mercouri's first movie was the Greek language film Stella (1955), directed by future Zorba the Greek director Michael Cacoyannis. The film received special praise at the 1956 Cannes Film Festival, where she met American film director Jules Dassin, with whom she would share not only her career but also her life. Their first professional pairing was 1957's He Who Must Die. Other films by Dassin and featuring Mercouri followed, such as The Law (1959).

Mercouri became well-known to international audiences when she starred in Never on Sunday (1960), of which Dassin was the director and co-star. For this film, she earned the Best Actress Award at the 1960 Cannes Film Festival and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress and the BAFTA Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role.[2]

After her first major international success, Mercouri went on to star in Phaedra (1962), for which she was nominated again for the BAFTA Award and the Golden Globe Award for Best Actress in Motion Picture Drama. The recognition of her acting talent did not stop though, as her role in Topkapi (1964) granted her one more nomination, this time for the Golden Globe Award for Best Actress in Motion Picture Musical or Comedy. Mercouri worked with such directors as Joseph Losey, Vittorio De Sica, Ronald Neame, Carl Foreman, Norman Jewison, and starred in films like Spanish language The Uninhibited by Juan Antonio Bardem.

Mercouri continued her stage career in the Greek production of Tennessee Williams's Sweet Bird of Youth (1960), under the direction of Karolos Koun. In 1967, she played the leading role in Illya Darling (from 11 April 1967 to 13 January 1968) on Broadway,[3] for which she was nominated for the Tony Award for Best Performance by a Leading Actress in a Musical. Mercouri's performance in Promise at Dawn (1970) earned her another Golden Globe Award nomination.

Mercouri concentrated on her stage career for the following years, playing in the Greek productions of The Threepenny Opera and, for a second time, Sweet Bird of Youth, in addition to the ancient Greek tragedies Medea and Oresteia. She retired from film acting in 1978, when she played in her last film, A Dream of Passion, directed by her husband, Jules Dassin. Mercouri's last performance on stage was in the opera Pylades at the Athens Concert Hall in 1992, portraying Clytemnestra.

Filmography

Year	Title	Role	Notes
1955	Stella	Stella	Nominated - Cannes Film Festival Best Actress Award
1957	He Who Must Die	Katerina
1958	The Gypsy and the Gentleman	Belle
1959	The Law	Donna Lucrezia
1960	Never on Sunday	Ilya	Won - Cannes Film Festival Best Actress Award Nominated - Academy Award for Best Actress Nominated - BAFTA Award for Best Foreign Actress
1961	Long Live Henry IV... Long Live Love	Marie de Médicis
	The Last Judgment	Foreign lady
1962	Phaedra	Phaedra	Nominated - BAFTA Award for Best Foreign Actress Nominated - Golden Globe Award for Best Actress – Motion Picture Drama
1963	The Victors	Magda
	Canzoni nel mondo	Himself
1964	Topkapi	Elizabeth Lipp	Nominated - Golden Globe Award for Best Actress – Motion Picture Musical or Comedy
1965	The Uninhibited	Jenny
1966	A Man Could Get Killed	Aurora
	10:30 P.M. Summer	Maria
1969	Gaily, Gaily	Lil
1970	Promise at Dawn	Nina Kacew	Nominated - Golden Globe Award for Best Actress – Motion Picture Drama
1974	The Rehearsal	Belle
1975	Once Is Not Enough	Karla
	Kipros	Herself
1977	Nasty Habits	Sister Gertrude
1978	A Dream of Passion	Maya
1981	Gynaikes stin exoria	Narrator	Voice, Short, (final film role)

As singer

One of her first songs was by Manos Hadjidakis and Nikos Gatsos. It was titled Hartino to Fengaraki ("Papermoon") and was a part of the Greek production of A Streetcar Named Desire in 1949, in which she starred as Blanche DuBois. The first official recording of this, now-legendary song was made by Nana Mouskouri in 1960, although the company Sirius, created by Manos Hadjidakis, issued, in 2004, a recording Melina had made for French television during the 1960s. Her recordings of "Athenes, ma Ville", a collaboration with Vangelis, and "Melinaki", were popular in France. Her recording of "Feggari mou, Agapi mou" (Phaedra) was quite popular and was later covered by Marinella in 1965.

Political career

Activism against the Greek junta

At the time of the coup d'état in Greece by a group of colonels of the Greek military on 21 April 1967, she was in the United States, playing in Illya Darling. She immediately joined the struggle against the Greek Military Junta and started an international campaign, travelling all over the world to inform the public and contribute to the isolation and fall of the colonels. As a result, the dictatorial regime revoked her Greek citizenship and confiscated her property.[4]

When her citizenship was taken away, she said: "I was born a Greek and I will die a Greek. Those bastards were born fascists and they will die fascists".[5][6][7][8][9]

While in London she worked with Amalia Fleming and Helen Vlachos of Kathimerini against the junta of the colonels.[10]

Involvement in politics

After the fall of the Junta and during the metapolitefsi in 1974, Mercouri settled in Greece and was one of the founding members of the Panhellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK), a centre-left political party. She was a member of the party's Central Committee and a rapporteur for the Culture Section, while being involved in the women's movement as well.

In the Greek legislative elections of 1974, she was a PASOK candidate in the Piraeus B constituency, but the 7,500 votes were not enough to secure a seat for her in the Hellenic Parliament (she needed 33 more votes), something that came true in the elections of 1977, in which she obtained the highest number of votes in the whole of Greece.

Minister for Culture: 1981–1989

Melina Mercouri (1985)

When PASOK won the elections of 1981, Mercouri was appointed Minister for Culture of Greece, being the first female in that post. She would serve in that position for two terms until 1989, when PASOK lost the elections and New Democracy formed a cabinet. As Minister for Culture, Mercouri took advantage of her fame abroad and got in contact with great European leaders in order to promote Greece. She strongly advocated the return to Athens of the Parthenon Marbles, that were removed from Parthenon and other buildings on the Acropolis of Athens by Thomas Bruce, 7th Earl of Elgin, and are now part of the British Museum collection in London. In 1983, she had a famous live television spat with then British Museum director David M. Wilson, which was widely interpreted as a public relations disaster for the British museum.[11] In anticipation of the return of the marbles, she held an international competition for the construction of the New Acropolis Museum, designated to display them and finally established in 2008.[1]

One of her greatest achievements was the establishment of the institution of the European Capital of Culture within the framework of cultural policy of the European Union, that she had conceived and proposed in 1983, with Athens inaugurating this institution being the first title-holder in 1985, while she was a devoted supporter of the Athens bid to host the Centennial Olympic Games. In 1983, during the first Greek presidency of the Council of the European Union, Mercouri invited the Ministers for Culture of the other nine member states of the European Union at Zappeion, in order to increase the people's cultural awareness, since there was not any reference to cultural questions in the Treaty of Rome, which led to the establishment of formal sessions between the Ministers of Culture of the European Union. During the second presidency of Greece in 1988, she supported the cooperation between Eastern Europe and the European Union, which was finally implemented one year later with the celebration of the Month of Culture in Eastern countries.

Mercouri commissioned a study for the integration of all the archaeological sites of Athens to create a traffic-free archaeological park to promote the Greek culture. She introduced free access to museums and archaeological sites for Greek citizens, organized a series of exhibitions of Greek cultural heritage and modern Greek art worldwide, supported the restoration of buildings of special architectural interest and the completion of the Athens Concert Hall, backed the project of the Museum of Byzantine culture in Thessaloniki and established annual literary pizes.

In June 1986 Melina Mercouri spoke at the Oxford Union, a world-famous debating society, on the matter of the Parthenon Marbles and whether they should remain in London or be returned to Greece. She argued passionately for the Marble's reunification. As she explains, the Marbles are more to Greece than just works of art: they are an essential element of Greek heritage, which ties directly into cultural identity. She said: "You must understand what the Parthenon Marbles mean to us. They are our pride. They are our sacrifices. They are our noblest symbol of excellence. They are a tribute to the democratic philosophy. They are our aspirations and our name. They are the essence of Greekness."[12] Her stance on the matter has inspired a new wave of activism on the issue, and inspired pride in Greek culture and history.

Minister for Culture: 1993–1994

In the legislative elections of November 1989, PASOK lost and Mercouri was elected a member of the Hellenic Parliament and remained a member of the party's Executive Bureau. In 1990, she was a candidate for Mayor of Athens but she was defeated by Antonis Tritsis.

After PASOK's win in the election of 1993, she was back at the Ministry for Culture.[13] Her major goals in this second term in office were: to create a cultural park in the Aegean Sea in order to protect and enhance the environment and civilization of the Aegean Islands, and to link culture with education at all education levels, introducing a system of post-training of teachers.

Death

Mercouri died on 6 March 1994 at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, New York City, from lung cancer.[14] She was survived by her husband, Jules Dassin. She had no children. She received a state funeral with Prime Minister's honors at the First Cemetery of Athens four days later. The Melina Mercouri Foundation was founded by her widower. After her death, UNESCO established the ‘Melina Mercouri International Prize for the Safeguarding and Management of Cultural Landscapes (UNESCO-Greece)' which rewards outstanding examples of action to safeguard and enhance the world's major cultural landscapes.[13][15]

Tribute

The song "Melina" by Camilo Sesto (from the 1975 album "Amor libre") is dedicated to Melína Merkoúri.[16][17]

On 18 October 2015, Google Doodle commemorated her 95th birthday.[18]

Gallery

• 
  Athens Metro Acropolis station. Melina's photograph on the right.
• 
  Bust of Melina Mercouri, Athens

Notes

1. New style: 31 October 1920

References

1. Casey, Christopher (October 30, 2008). ""Grecian Grandeurs and the Rude Wasting of Old Time": Britain, the Elgin Marbles, and Post-Revolutionary Hellenism". Foundations. Volume III, Number 1. Archived from the original on May 13, 2009. Retrieved 2009-06-25.
2. Profile, bafta.org; accessed 6 December 2014.
3. Melina Mercouri at the Internet Broadway Database
4. Newsweek. Newsweek. 1967. Retrieved 17 March 2013. Greek word for honey (rneli), but there was acid in her throaty voice last week as vibrant Melina Mercouri condemned Brig. Gen. Stylianos Pattakos, strong man of the Greek revolutionary junta which had just stripped her of citizenship and property ... Those bastards were born Fascists; they will die Fascists", said the passionate performer who until the recent coup did as ...
5. Newsweek. Newsweek, Incorporated. 1967. Retrieved 17 March 2013. "I was born a Greek; I will die a Greek. Mr. Pattakos was born a Fascist; he will die a Fascist", said the passionate performer who until the recent coup did as much to spur Greek tourism as all the ancient ruins combined. ...
6. Books and Bookmen. Hansom Books. 1971. Retrieved 17 March 2013. When asked if she had any comment on this she replied: 'I was born Greek. I shall die Greek. Those bastards were born fascists and they will die fascists.
7. Labor Today. National Center for Trade Union Action and Democracy. Retrieved 17 March 2013. No wonder the talented actress Melina Mercouri, after being stripped of her Greek citizenship in absentia, said of junta member Colonel Pattakos : "I was born a Greek and I will die a Greek. Pattakos was born a Fascist and will die a Fascist.
8. Helen Vlachos (1971). Free Greek voices: a political anthology. (10 Gayfere St., SWIP 3HN), Doric Publications Ltd. Retrieved 17 March 2013. He repeated it. And my answer came like water from a fountain: 'I was born a Greek, I will die a Greek; Pattakos was born Fascist, he will die Fascist . . .' "And now what will happen, Melina?" I am asked. Now there will be a trial at some ...
9. Balkania. Balkania Publishing Company. 1967. Retrieved 17 March 2013. ... Patakos was born a fascist and will die a fascist," Miss Mercouri said at a press conference she called shortly after hearing that her citizenship had been ...
10. RICHARD CLOGG (17 October 1995). "Obituary: Helen Vlachos". The Independent. Retrieved 15 March 2013.
11. "How Mercouri tackled Britain in 1983 battle of the Marbles". The Times of London.
12. Ian Windale (9 February 1997). "The Parthenon Marbles, Melina's Speech to the Oxford Union".
13. Melina Mercouri profile, Hellenic Ministry of Culture website; accessed 6 December 2014.
14. Melina Mercouri, Actress and Politician, Is Dead
15. Foundation Melina Mercouri (in Greek and English)
16. "¿Quién fue 'Melina'? La extraordinaria mujer que da título a la canción de Camilo Sesto". El Confidencial (in Spanish). 2019-09-10. Retrieved 2019-09-11.
17. "¿Quién es Melina, la de la famosa canción de Camilo Sesto? Es una mujer. Y no es un tema de amor…". www.msn.com. Retrieved 2019-09-11.
18. "Melina Mercouri's 95th Birthday". Google.com. 18 October 2015.

External links

• Melina Mercouri on IMDb
• Melina Mercouri at the Internet Broadway Database
• Foundation Melina Mercouri (in Greek and English)
• Melina Mercouri at The New York Times Movies

Political offices
Preceded by Andreas Andrianopoulos	Minister for Culture of Greece 1981–1989	Succeeded by Georgios Mylonas
Preceded by Dora Bakoyannis	Minister for Culture of Greece 1993–1994	Succeeded by Thanos Mikroutsikos