Four years on: remembering Irene Papas, the face of Zorba the Greek

Irene Papas, the Greek actress and singer best known internationally for Zorba the Greek, died on 14 September 2022. Early reports gave her age as 96; later biographies and a Washington Post correction put her birth at 3 September 1929 in Chiliomodi, near Corinth, making her 93. Greece’s Culture Ministry confirmed the death that Wednesday. She had been living with Alzheimer’s disease since about 2013.

Born Eirini Lelekou to schoolteachers — her father taught classical drama — she grew up in Athens, entered drama school as a teenager, and built a career of more than 50 years and 70-plus films.

What she is remembered for

Papas became a global name in the 1960s: a resistance fighter in The Guns of Navarone (1961), the widow in Michael Cacoyannis’s Zorba the Greek (1964) opposite Anthony Quinn and Alan Bates, and the grieving wife in Costa-Gavras’s Z (1969). The Zorba score by Mikis Theodorakis, especially “Zorba’s Dance,” still carries her image.

Critics often ranked her classical roles higher than the Hollywood hits. She took the title parts in Antigone (1961) and Cacoyannis’s Electra (1962), then Helen in The Trojan Women (1971) with Katharine Hepburn and Vanessa Redgrave, and Clytemnestra in Iphigenia (1977). She won Best Actress at Berlin for Antigone and from the National Board of Review for The Trojan Women.

Later screen work included Captain Corelli’s Mandolin (2001) with Nicolas Cage and Penélope Cruz, and her last film, Manoel de Oliveira’s A Talking Picture (2003), with Catherine Deneuve and John Malkovich.

She also sang: folk albums with Vangelis (Odes) and a notorious spoken-sung passage on Aphrodite’s Child’s 666.

Exile, image, private life

A liberal, she left Greece during the 1967–1974 junta and worked in Italy and the United States. Long dark hair, pale skin and arched brows made her a stock image of “Mediterranean” beauty — Culture Minister Lina Mendoni called her “majestic, stately, dynamic… an international star who radiated Greekness.”

She married director-actor Alkis Papas in 1947 (divorced 1951) and had a brief, later-annulled marriage to producer José Kohn in 1957. She had no children. After Marlon Brando died in 2004 she told Corriere della Sera he had been “the great passion of my life”; they met in Rome in 1954 and last saw each other in Athens in 1999.

She spent her final years in Greece, cared for by family, and was buried in Chiliomodi.

Four years later her films still circulate as the standard screen versions of Greek tragedy — and as the face next to Quinn when the sirtaki starts.

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