It’s no secret that Hollywood loves a biopic and, this month, the film industry is honing in on the life of one of opera’s biggest stars: Maria Callas. Directed by Pablo Larraín – who is no stranger to retelling the lives of some of the world’s most famous women, with former films focusing on Princess Diana in Spencer (2021) and Jacqueline Kennedy in Jackie (2016) – there’s a certain irony that his attention has now turned to Callas, given his former subject Jackie Kennedy was the woman Callas’ greatest love left her for. 

However, it’s not Callas’ love life that made her famous, but her voice. Portrayed by Angelina Jolie in the highly-anticipated Maria, which is in cinemas and available to stream on Netflix from 10 January, Larraín’s biopic delves into the grit and glamour of Callas’ life up until her premature death at the age of 53. Given that Jolie received an eight-minute standing ovation at the film’s Venice Film Festival debut last year, expect big things.

Born Maria Anna Cecilia Sophia Kalogeropoulos on 2 December 1923 in Manhattan, New York, to Greek immigrant parents, she quickly adopted the shortened surname ‘Callas’. Aged 13, her parents divorced and her mother moved Callas and her sister, Jackie, back to Athens where she was swiftly introduced to the world of music. As a teen, she trained at the Greek National Conservatory and Athens Conservatoire – the oldest performing arts institution in modern Greece. Under the tutelage of talented sopranos Maria Trivella and Elvira De Hidalgo, Callas’ singing transformed, laying the foundations for her to become one of the most famous opera singers in the world. 

Image: Netflix

Maria Callas. Image: Alamy

The 1940s proved to be the pinnacle of Callas’ career. During this decade she made her first appearance on stage in Franz von Suppé’s 1941 operetta Boccaccio, and quickly landed her inaugural leading role as Tosca in a 1942 production of Giacomo Puccini’s renowned opera. In 1945, she left Greece for America, not only to reunite with her estranged father, but to take to the stage in America. Already showing her diva inclinations, Callas famously declined a role in Madame Butterfly at the Metropolitan Opera of New York as she believed her physique unsuitable for the leading role and she didn’t want to perform in English, as requested.

Instead, Callas’ international career was launched with a performance in Ponchielli’s Gioconda in 1947, a role secured by her manager and wealthy Italian businessman Giovanni Battista Meneghini, who she met when she was 23 and he was 51. The relationship soon became romantic, and the couple married in 1949 with Meneghini continued to oversee her career which, in Callas’s words, soon became “controlling” rather than collaborative. According to Lyndsy Spence’s 2021 biography, Cast a Diva: The Hidden Life of Maria Callas, she accused him of putting all of their joint assets in his name, effectively stealing half of everything she rightfully owned.

The effect of Menegheni’s actions are further underscored by the sheer extent of Callas’ success and talent. Her repertoire ranged from classical opera to the bel canto arias of Donizetti, Bellini, and Rossini, and further to the works of Verdi and Puccini. She starred in countless theatre productions, films and operas throughout the 1940s and ‘50s, with her talent leading to her being hailed as La Davina, meaning ‘the divine one’. 

In 1956, Callas was invited to open the operatic season at the New York Metropolitan Opera with a leading role in Norma. While the performance was met with mixed reviews, it coincided with a rather controversial article in Time magazine. The cover image was a dark, ruby red painting of her face, and the article not only emphasised her talent but also her supposed nasty streak, with the journalist writing that Callas was ‘a diva more widely hated by her colleagues and more wildly acclaimed by her public than any other living singer’. 

Maria Callas with her husband Giovanni Meneghini in 1947. Image: Alamy

Angelina Jolie as Maria Callas and Haluk Bilginer as Aristotle Onassis in Maria (2024). Image: Netflix

In the article, Callas dismissed her rival, Italian soprano Renata Tebaldi, as having “no backbone”, and shocked readers by blatantly and bitterly turning against her mother. “I’ll never forgive her,” she told Time, “for taking my childhood away. During all the years I should have been playing and growing up, I was singing or making money. Everything I did for them was mostly good and everything they did to me was mostly bad.” In 1951, Callas’ mother reportedly wrote to her asking for $100 “for [her] daily bread.” Callas replied: “Don’t come to us with your troubles. I had to work for my money, and you are young enough to work, too. If you can’t make enough money to live on, you can jump out of the window or drown yourself.” Unsurprisingly, the nickname ‘diva’ stuck. 

A year later, with her marriage failing, Callas met Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis at a party. According to a New York Times story published in 2000, in 1959 Onassis invited Callas and Meneghini to join him and several other guests on a Mediterranean cruise. Despite both Onassis’ and Callas’ other halves being on board, the two started an affair – one which would last nine years and result in both leaving their partners.Justifying her actions in her The Washington Post obituary, Callas said: “The world has condemned me for leaving my husband, but I didn't leave him – he left me because I would not let him take care of my business affairs anymore. I was kept in a cage so long that when I met Aristo and his friends, so full of life and glamour, I became a different woman.”

In the early 1960s, Callas’ voice declined along with her presence on stage. The New Yorker reported she had ‘a flurry of troubled performances in 1964-65’ and then ‘a disastrous concert tour in 1973-74’. Among the contributing factors were a  dramatic diet, which saw her shed 60 pounds after years of being called fat by the media, and a medical condition which left her feeling dizzy and with blurred vision – biographer Spence writes ‘she was classed as crazy, dramatic, a hypochondriac’ – and addiction after Onassis reportedly introduced her to a drug which sedated her nervous system. 

The biggest blow to Callas came when her long-term lover Onassis married Jackie Kennedy in 1968. Callas had desperately wanted to marry him throughout their decade together while also falling pregnant multiple times but repeatedly miscarried. Although she maintained the split was amicable, Callas was heartbroken – and despite his newfound love, Onassis continued to stay in contact with her. His personal secretary at the time, Kiki Feroudi Moutsatsos, told People magazine that “Maria was a piece of his soul, of his body, of his brain”. When on his deathbed in 1975, Callas visited him, with Moutsatsos recounting: “She knew because she had spoken to the doctor that there was no hope – that he was almost dead, finished and Maria had no hope that they would ever be together again”. After he died, “Maria was living in her own world. She didn’t want to eat, didn’t want to go out, she didn’t want to speak with friends. She lost her appetite to live.”

Angelina Jolie as Maria Callas in Maria (2024). Image: Netflix

Maria Callas in Paris, 1973. Image: Alamy

Losing Onassis caused Callas to retreat from public life altogether. Her final years were spent living in an apartment in Paris with only her housekeeper and butler as company, and she died in 1977 at 53 of a heart attack, leaving behind a legacy as one of the all-time great opera divas’. 

With her life now set to be in the spotlight once again, Jolie told journalists at Venice Film Festival: “I think [the word diva] often comes with a lot of negative connotations. I think I've re-learned that word through Maria [...] and I have a new relationship to it. It is often other people's perception of a woman that defines, sometimes too much, who she is and who she was, or what she intended – and I actually think [Maria] was one of the hardest working people, who didn't hurt anybody.”

Images: Netflix

While her character continues to be a subject of many debates, Time’s 1956 article highlights how it was her voice that carried her career, not her controversy: ‘The special quality of the Callas voice is not tone. It is the extraordinary ability to carry, as can no other, the inflections and nuances of emotion, from mordant intensity to hushed delicacy. Callas’ singing always seems to have a surprise in reserve.’ And while her life also had many surprises, despite it all Callas told Barbara Walters in 1974: “[I have] no regrets.”

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