- I was baptised after my paternal grandmother in a Greek Orthodox Church with the name of 'Angeliki' - simple and mellifluous, and meaning heavenly messenger.
- The breaking of casting clichés also broke boundaries.A short Latin- looking actress like me playing classical roles such as Miss Julie , and playing them well, made casting directors uncomfortable.
- My grandmother was a fearless Greek warrioress, and very protective of her land. She literally ordered some Nazi soldiers to get off one of her fields, pointing a gun at them.
- Where does one begin to express what I consider to be my Greek heritage and the awe that I feel for its magnificence?
- A great play that deals with the perennial concerns of people can come from anywhere, can be spoken with any accent, and can be played by actors of any colour.
- As an actress I decided that I was not going to accept being cast in token ethnic roles in film or on TV.
- The Greek people have become exiles in their country and are alienated from their identity metaphorically speaking. They have to find their way back and take control of their land.
- The entry of Greece into the Eurozone also presented the Greek people with the Memphistophelian temptation of the false glamour of a western type consumerist society-easy credit cards, bank loans.
- I think that if I go to Constantinoupolis and see Agia Sophia desecrated by some exhibition of tiles or a fashion show, as I've heard has happened, or see the neglected shambles of the greatest mural of Christianity- the Resurrected Christ trampling on Death - I think I will commit the illegal.
- Theo Angelopoulos was a giant of World cinema. He died tragically in an accident and Greece has lost one of her magisterial sons. Zoi se mas! May God keep him safely in His embrace.
- When Anna Diamantopoulou was working as an MEP she was pleased to take her E120,000-euro salary with all its perks. But now she has the audacity to speak of forgotten sacrifices that Greece's MPs should have made! All these so-called MPs -- who are supposed to be the servants of the people -- should reduce their 8,000 euro per month salary -- while half of Greece is starving -- to 2,500 euros per month -- and see if their majesties can survive on what constitutes five times more than what some Greek families have now been forced to live on
- The foreign countries, dear Kathimerini, do not give a damn about the destruction of the fabric of Greek society, or the departure of Greece's most talented, or the outflow of the real capital from Greece caused by the austerity measures and increased taxation -- they just care about their banks -- get this into your heads. Who gives a damn about these foreign impressions? We care about Greece!
- I arranged a meeting between Elia Kazan and the London based film financier Frixos Constantini of Poseidon Films at the Grand Bretagne Hotel in Athens. What followed from this meeting is that Mr Constantini put Elia Kazan in touch with Martin Scorsese a personal friend of Mr Constantini and who also runs the production company Cappa films. And so it was that these two giants of US cinema met for the first time.
- A photo of me standing at picket line on the WITS side of Jan Smuts avenue during one of the protests appeared in the 'Star' newspaper. The local MP from the Nationalist Party Boksburg constituency saw it and made an ominous call to my parents 'I didn't know that your daughter was communist!' and put the phone down on them. Of course I wasn't a 'communist' but anyone who opposed the regime was automatically labeled as a communist
- To continue about my Greek heritage: the gift of Orthodoxia : The call by the Christ not to be just good moral and ethical beings - which is where the western Churches stop- but to go beyond that , to be "theanthropic" - to reflect the generosity and magnificence and beauty of the Christ.
- As a little girl my mother used to take me with her to her fittings with her very expensive seamstress. I was dazzled by the beauty of the fabrics and the whole procedure. I still remember the feel of expensive taffeta.
- I myself have experienced the volcanic existential depths of the Greek language. It was during a performance of Medea by Tzeni Karezi at the Herod Atticus theatre in Athens ,when she was pleading to the callous Jason to take pity on her and she used the word ' splachniasou'. 'Pity' is too weak a word to describe the emotional and psychological depths ' splachniasou' expresses. 'Splachna 'is the part of the body where a woman carries her unborn children - the very root of ontological existence. How deep can you get!
- A very tragic story which also expresses the scars and trauma that still trouble our contemporary Greek consciousness is the beheading of my Communist uncle and my mother's cousin by the Royalists during the ill-fated Civil War. Post WWII. As I have already mentioned Kalamata was mainly Royalist territory - and for what might you ask - for a kingly lineage that wasn't even Greek but imported originally from Austria, and imposed on Greece by the Great Powers. My uncle was caught, treated as a traitor and beheaded. His head was then sent in a sack to his mother, whose uncontrollably grief stricken cries could be heard all over the village for days on end. This young man had been a very amenable and lovable person and the whole village was dumbstruck with disbelief!
- Part of my Greek heritage: The everyday resistance by Greece and the Greeks to the illegal invasions by Turkish planes on our airspace. What we have now is a Neo-Ottomanism led by Erdogan and Davidoglou.
- Another really painful thing is the realization that the Greek rich couldn't give damn about Greece.
- Medea represented the unwanted and disposable 'other' in the comfortable and cozy Greek society that the feckless Jason brings her to. She is abused and discarded. I played her as a volcanic barefooted Anna Magnani.
- I invited the great Lindsay Anderson to several of my productions. When he was doing Britannia Hospital I was offered the part of a patient after he had seen me in 'Tis Pity' - but the timing collided with a performance of 'El Campo'
- Theatro Technis was a theatre company that practiced political theatre in its purest form! I found myself performing a Greek Cypriot peasant woman driven from her land in the North of Cyprus and expressing her grief at the loss of her home in front of an audience that included refugees who had suffered the same fate but had managed to escape to London. The tears just flowed naturally.
- The play chosen to incarnate this new multi-racial and multi-accented presentation of a great classic - was Jean Genets The Balcony. A prophetic choice, as the play is set in a Paris that is in turmoil with rioting, just as London at this point of time was being torched during the Brixton riots, an explosion of the racial tensions that had been simmering for some time as a result of the SAS laws, thwarted potentials etc etc . The Balcony explored the escape from the repressive social realities to the opiate and sexual palliatives provided by the House of Illusion.
- The ground breaking production of the company, ...run.. from a bedsit in St John's Wood and required 18 hours of work a day, and the point at which the cross cultural and multi-racial casting began to bite, was the production of Brecht's great anti-war play - Mother Courage.
- The gift of Byzantine doxology. As the great Sir John Taverner says: 'The music of the Byzantine Church is not something better or more amazing than something else, but rather beyond everything else that is known, and can be known; something before all ages and unmoved is coming to birth, something new, and yet already known, but heard for the first time, to heal and transform us, with all the integrity, and with all the humility of our calling as sacred beings'.
- El Campo - Internationalist Theatre's second play was written by the Argentinian playwright Griselda Gambaro , who had been hounded out of her native Argentina by the Junta and was now living in Spain , opened on the day That Writers International were remembering the writers banned in their own countries......The production received stunning reviews, which included an interview with the Spanish language BBC Latin American Service. People came to see it twice. This was great political theatre that crossed countries, cultural barriers and had a multi-racial cast.
- Enemies by Maxim Gorky too had great social and political resonance. When I submitted the play to the director/manager of the theatre venue Ann Pennington she was so bowled over that she insisted that my company could not present it unless she directed it, and it was a co-production. The timing of this performance proved as prophetic as that of The Balcony. Enemies explored the simmering revolt of the suppressed exploited masses of Russian surfs against their land owning masters, and the inaction of the elites to do anything about it. In the UK the miners were fighting against exploitation, and to save their mines against closure.
- [on the multi-racial casting of Mother Courage] Another instance that the establishment was riled, is the reaction of a leading casting director Irene Lamb in a telephone conversation with one of the cast, named Joe Figg: 'Why is she doing this?' The word spread around. I went for a TV audition and the director commented that he had heard that this tiny actress had organized a production of Mother Courage which was making waves. And I replied 'That's me'. The casting cliches had been thrown out of the window.
- My honours in English literature, discovering Jacobean tragedies and greats like Beckett only increased my hunger to perform, so after graduation I went to Cape Town Drama School, where one of my classmates was the inimitable Reza de Wet, a liberal intellectual who punctured the cliché that Afrikaners were racists and bigots.
- I arrived at as an undergraduate( Wits University) with two driving passions: a consuming interest for a politics of justice grounded in a Christian theology - and acting, as a 'revelation of the treasures of the human soul' not as a form of exhibitionism.
- On campus there were rumblings of unrest. Sizwe Banzi was being performed on campus, Nadine Gordimer was giving talks. During that time I met George Bizos, who nicknamed me 'l'enfant terrible' because of my desire to change the status quo.
- Other companies started copying our casting policies. Previously there were black companies doing black themed plays, Indian companies doing Indian themed plays. Now companies moved out of this comfort zone.
- In a country where racism was institutionalized by a minority Afrikaner Power elite - subtler discriminations against Caucasian immigrants of other than protestant Afrikaner stock was rife. The Afrikaners discriminated against the "Rooi necks" - literally Rednecks, a derogatory term for the British who had treated them appallingly in the Colonial past.
- Listening enthralled to the Greek myths about the great achievements of the Greek heroes and heroines and deciding that I too wanted to be a Greek Heroine.
- The smell of "yiasemi" wafting in the air of a balmy Greek summer evening.
- The glory of the constellations of stars viewed under the clear evening skies of the Greek countryside.
- I avidly read text books on Classical Greek thought during school holidays acquainting myself with Socrates and Plato. It wasn't a surprise then that when I went University I studied Greek Philosophy- and was moved to my soul with the beauty and depth.
- Many of the Greek journalists and TV presenters also seem to share this 'progressive intellectualism' which leads Greeks to having to apologize for being Orthodox- What a load of rubbish!
- Our current Greek westernized political leaders also seem to desire this too, with Papandreou always citing the Swedish model being an ideal that Greece should aspire to. What on earth is this man doing running Greece?! What does Orthodox Greece have in common with Lutheran Protestant and sterilized Sweden????
- I'd like to shame the Greek parents who have neglected to transmit to their children the gift of the Greek language.
- ....in contemporary Britain how many thousands of intellectuals and Professors acknowledge that our great language is the root base of most of the important terms used in intellectual discourse.
- What did the great Shelley exclaim when he was overwhelmed with the beauty of the Greek language' Oh most excellent of languages'
- The Athanasian Creed, the dogma of Christ the Homiousios, of the same essence as the Father , the dogma of Christ - fully God and Fully Human , The dogma of the Holy Trinity - 'that Christ is the incarnation of the indivisible source of the Divine Godhead through the power of the Holy Spirit ' could only have been formulated by the Church Fathers within the linguistic structures and concepts provided by early century Greek language and thought., e.g concepts such as the God/man - a concept that which does not exist in the Hebrew and is totally foreign to Hebrew culture. Hence Shelley's assertion that the Greeks /the Hellenes 'gave us our religion '.
- My inheritance of Alexandros the Great, student of the great Aristotle, uniter of all Greek tribes , creator of the Hellenistic Empire and promulgator of our great Greek heritage . One point that historians forget to mention is that Alexandros always sent the booty of his conquests, not to Pela, but to Athens - the capital and centre of Hellas.
- My honours in English Literature, discovering Jacobean tragedies and greats like Beckett only increased my hunger to perform, so after graduation I went to Cape Town Drama School, where one of my classmates was the inimitable Reza de Wet, a liberal intellectual who punctured the cliche that Afrikaners were racists and bigots.
- By the time I graduated from Cape Town, I had come to the realization that there was no place for me in South Africa as it existed at that time, .... because I found it difficult to function as an individual in a society that considered 73 % of population as inferior, that my Greek community frowned on me as an actress.. and my beliefs for a just non-racial society had now incorporated a fight for the equality for women - an anathema to the undeveloped conservative Greek community in which I had my social being. I didn't want to spend my life apologizing for who and what I was.
- In our family we only spoke Greek to our parents - not to do so would be disrespectful.
- My Miss Julie was going to explore the depths of inner turmoil that a confused upbringing had inflicted on her by being brought up as a man by her militaristic father
- What did the great Shelley exclaim when he was overwhelmed with the beauty of the Greek language? "Oh most excellent of languages."
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