She says she hasn’t been herself for ten years. That could be a definition of the acting profession. And with her therapist she continues her “search for herself” after a divorce and six children. Will Angelina Jolie be in Callas? It would be a new “mise en abyme”, the reflection of a painting in the reflection of a painting… ad infinitum. Because this Callas that the Chilean director Pablo Larrain wants to tell is the diva who has fallen from her throne at the moment when she desperately tries to live a normal life, which amounts to walking on water want to no longer touch the earth for what she has done for so long.
La Callas would also have had many reasons to “work on himself”, firstly, to reconcile with Maria Anna Cecilia Sofia Kalogeropoulos, born on December 2, 1923 in New York, the daughter of a pharmacist, a former respected man Meligalas, a town in the south of the Peloponnese and became the owner of a drugstore or, so to speak, “grocer” in an expatriate neighborhood in the Little Athens district of New York… Every generation has its dreams and its cruelty.
Until her death in 1977, Paris Match dedicated 35 subjects to Callas because she was a global star, a rank to which only such great international stars as Michael Jackson had risen. If no one except a few thousand spectators goes to the opera, at least everyone knew it by name. It was impossible for her to listen distractedly to this phenomenon while doing something else, and whose voice could never have been used for elevator music, for example… at the risk of accidental descent to the desired floor.
Maria Callas and Aristotle Onassis land on the Ionian island of Kefalonia in 1960. SIPA / © SIPA
His transformation was visual after it had been musical. The former child virtuoso, who grew up in Greece after her parents’ divorce, undoubtedly had a nightingale in her voice, as her mother said, but for the silhouette one had to look for a more imposing bird. The icon, at the end of the work, seemed at least as inexorable as what had enabled him to sing “Tosca” at the age of 20, one of those roles that sensible artists only approach in adulthood in order to realize its true meaning. But Maria was not sensible. No longer in his desire to interpret Violetta in La Traviata or Norma, the big roles that offered him the opportunity to sing and act while at the same time having to follow a diet that melted his vocal muscles, but him also allowed to dominate her other conquests: a Dior or Yves Saint Laurent wardrobe, furs, small hats, flared skirts, all the accessories of the jet-setter of the 1960s and 1970s. And it would undoubtedly be almost a miracle if she found herself in Angelina’s slender body, that Angelina starts singing like Callas.
I would like to be Maria, but Callas demands that I behave with dignity
At the end of her life, lying on her bed in her third-floor apartment at 36 Avenue Georges-Mandel in Paris, Maria worked on her biography, which she recorded in French on magnetic tape: thoughts that were particularly close to her heart with the legend . “I would like to be Maria, but Callas demands that I behave with dignity. I would like to believe that the two are really one, because Callas was once Maria too, and I have always brought my whole personality into my music. Everything I was was always authentic. […] If someone really wants to understand me, they will find all of me in my work. »
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Dogs, boots, scarf, glasses… In front of Pablo Larrain’s camera, the actress remains true to her role model down to the smallest detail. Best picture / © Tiziano Da Silva – Pierre Perusseau
So what was it about this music that she couldn’t put into words? Yet they were simple, the passion and love that, for a Greek, necessarily go hand in hand with a love of theater and, in particular, tragedy. She started out as a diva before becoming a star. And the two creatures waged a bitter war until one laid down his weapons, even if it meant breaking the other’s heart but feeding the myth.
I would really like to sing again, but I have to sing alone…
Maria Callas
Maria Callas was now afraid of the scene she was still dreaming about. She had not forgotten the fangs of the haters waiting to see her mistake, and had prepared the bouquet of radishes to throw at them as a rosary. Even at the age of 50, she wrote to her old godfather as if she wanted to ask him for advice: “I don’t know what to do? Maybe I’ll start my exercises again… I’d really like to sing again, but I have to sing alone… The suggestions are many, but I have to look deep inside myself to know what I want,” are piling up the distant projects She canceled as soon as they came closer.
Ari was the only man she had truly loved, probably because he was the only one who opposed her
Not only was his voice broken because of the diets and the exertion, it was also broken because of the disillusionment. Left alone without love, without husband, without children, a ghostly silhouette caught in the streets of Paris between Etoile and Trocadéro, like the memory of a bygone era, a fallen queen who, despite herself, bears the memory of her crown.
There were a thousand ways to approach this mountain, Pablo Larrain does it with his cruelest facade, Jackie O., like a sequel to his film with Natalie Portman. Jackie O., for Onassis, as Jacqueline Bouvier-Kennedy wrote until the end of her life, was the one who snatched from Maria Callas her status as “the most famous woman in the world” and at the same time took away from Aristotle. She, said Ari, Greek shipowner, also the most famous billionaire of his time, in love with power even more than with money, friend of Churchill and Greta Garbo, the only man she had truly loved, undoubtedly because he was the only one who could resist him.
When they argued, she said to Onassis: “We are cursed!” We have too much money.”
The former Mrs. Kennedy, who by chance had been given the first name of Maria’s older sister, who for a long time had the love of a mother who only protected her with the severity of a gendarmerie adjutant, will remain her rival for all eternity. It is said that she learned of this formalization, which he had always refused to do, through the pressure of her marriage to Onassis on Skorpios, her island. Costa-Gavras explained that she was his true love, but Jackie was his Legion of Honor, the kind of band you wear like others wear a watch to prove your success. Artemis, Ari’s older sister, had a different explanation: he couldn’t marry Maria because she was of peasant stock and prone to weight gain.
When they argued, she would say, “We are cursed!” We have too much money. » And he answered: “What are you? You just have a ringing in your throat and it doesn’t work anymore. » After that, they generally disappeared to reconcile in the strictest privacy. But why do we want to suffer? Why fall in love with a man who doesn’t like music? Who reserved his box at the Metropolitan Opera in New York or at the Palais Garnier in Paris to have his friends served champagne and who had the greatest difficulty in remaining silent during the great arias that were commented on by the entire press the next day on .
Who won in the end, Jackie or Maria? Maria. But through Jackie’s loss
They met in 1959 during a party in Venice, the city of masks. They both got married, which didn’t bother them for long. He invited her and her husband to the “Christina O”, his yacht with the gold taps and (real) impressionist paintings in the aisles, where he also invited Jackie four years later. And the impresario husband quickly disappeared from the scene, leaving Maria to him. It was enough to look at them to understand that they were connected by something magnetic, a magnet that attracted or repelled them depending on the day.
And once he married Jackie, whom he had bought for the price of an ocean liner, he said kindly, he continued to find her at home, in Paris, because she was the only one who understood him and undoubtedly loved him. Who won in the end, Jackie or Maria? Maria. But Jackie’s mistakes quickly made her realize that you don’t escape tragedy by seeking refuge with a Greek.
Deep in the heart of the 48-year-old actress is the dream of being Callas
Broken by the death of his son, the sick Ari returned to Paris hoping to seek treatment and undoubtedly find Maria there, but it was too late. There always comes a time when old lovers have to accept the end of the fight due to lack of strength. What fate had given them, it took back. He was about twenty years older than her and she outlived him by two years. Onassis had two wives, he had two widows, but they were not the same. Maria died of a heart attack. Fragile at heart…she who only thought she was that way based on her feelings. Hollywood stars dream of such a fate, broken by long financial negotiations with their ex-partners…
How much will Angelina Jolie receive from the sale of the Miraval estate in Provence and its vines, the fruit of which was named “the best rosé in the world” in 2013? Deep in the heart of the 48-year-old actress, director of the 21st century and ex-wife of Brad Pitt also lies the dream of being Callas, the tragedy consumed by music, devoured by her passion for an unfaithful man, short, fat and even rude, but whom she loved madly, with a stupid love. And forever.