"I was born a Greek, and I will die a Greek." FIERY, SMOKY-VOICED GREEK stage and screen actress with green eyes and natural blonde hair – adept at both drama and comedy, Melina Mercouri was in many ways a parallel figure to stars ranging from Hollywoodites Susan Hayward and Joan Crawford to Italy's Sophia Loren and Anna Magnani. With a star persona manifesting an outsize personality, a penchant f
or melodrama and a riveting lust for life, Melina was an established stage performer by the early 1950s. She achieved international stardom with a number of features directed by the expatriate American director Jules Dassin, whom she married in 1966 and with whom she collaborated on nine films. Among these, audiences probably best remember Mercouri's delightful performance as a sentimental, happy-go-lucky prostitute in her signature film, "Never on Sunday". Long a political activist who sought to symbolise the soul of Greek national identity, Mercouri lived an off-screen life as adventurous as any torrid melodrama she enacted onscreen. An outspoken woman of principle, she was expelled from Greece by the notorious Colonels' Junta in 1967 but eventually returned in 1974 and won a parliamentary seat for the Socialist party in 1977. Mercouri's acting career gradually abated as she later became the flamboyant and controversial Greek Minister of Culture and Sciences, and gained her greatest attention in that capacity when she successfully lobbied for the return of the Elgin Marbles – classical sculptures which the British Museum had removed from the Parthenon in the 19th century. Mercouri later ran unsuccessfully for the office of Mayor of Athens in 1990 while still retaining her seat in Parliament and returned to her ministerial job in October of 1993, not long before her death from lung cancer complications. For both her acting achievements on stage and screen and for her zestful commitment to Greek art and politics, Mercouri was justly mourned as a national heroine.
