Actresses From The United Kingdom

"Theatro Technis in North London, where the issues of prejudice against immigrants, the poor, the illiterate were dramatised , and more urgently the exploration of the war crime that constituted the illegal invasion by the Turkish military of CYPRUS, and for which the USA ( especially the diabolical Kissinger ) and the UK had little concern, as the president of Cyprus was the Orthodox Archbishop Makarios, who had the reputation of being a bit of a red. This 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. It was also at this theatre that I tackled the Mount Everest of acting parts – Medea(play) by Euripides, and which I performed to great reviews and was the performance that put me on the London map as an actress. The whole play was interpreted politically."

"the great comedic film director Thodoros Maragos , of the well known film 'Mathe Paedi mou Grammata!' wrote a part specially for me , Ms Ortiki in his 12 part ERT1 television series "Emmones Idees"."

"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!"

"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."

"My first tentative efforts in creating my theatre company were mounting John Ford’s `Tis Pity She`s a Whore ”. I asked people for money for my production, even as I found myself canvassing for another cause. This production was not the totally multi-racial cast that I had hoped for but did consist of actors from other cultures and differing accents, and also achieved a very high level of production value and rave reviews. It also provided the springboard for the extremely talented director/ designer couple Declan Donnellan and Nicolas Ormerod, who went onto creating the now world famous Cheek by Jowl company."

"As an actress I decided that I was not going to accept being cast in token ethnic roles in film or on TV, nor act any parts that I considered demeaned the portrayal of a non-British character. To illustrate this point; after seeing me perform Tatiana in Gorky’s Enemies(play) the well-known TV director, and very nice man, Chris Menaul offered me the role of the main Russian air hostess in a Malcolm Bradbury BBC TV series. He was taken aback when I turned the part down as I didn’t have any TV credits. I gave some excuse ‘that I thought the part vulgar” but the real reason was that Bradbury had portrayed the Russian air-hostesses in what I considered in a cliched demeaning way and involved a little Russia bashing. I have recently sent him a real explanation via his agent."

"I know I`m headstrong ."

"I'm known as the Greek warrioress...I come from a family of noble Greek women. My grandmother faced the Nazis during occupied Greece with a gun in her hand, and my mother is a veritable Hecuba, all strength and dignity.""

"British theatre was xenophobic and tunnel visioned . There was a resistance to using actors from other ethnicities, cultures, and races in production of classics. And a resistance to the non realistic plays like those of Brecht, Genet and Tennessee Williams""

"The breaking of casting cliches 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. It was unheard of that a short, dark-haired actress of Greek temperament could play the aristocratic Miss Julie. Not beautiful or tall enough etc. It proved one of the best productions of Miss Julie ever seen in London."

"The ground breaking production of the company, and the point at which the cross-cultural casting began to bite, was Brecht’s anti-war play Mother Courage. Just one comment in a review by critic Malcolm Hay jolted us into the realisation that we were making history: Why is an Indian actor playing the Pastor?"

"Our first play in 1981 was Jean Genet’s The Balcony , a prophetic choice, set in Paris in turmoil, just as London was being torched during the Brixton riots, an explosion of racial tensions that had been simmering for some time. I insisted on casting a Caribbean actress to play the lead, Irma the Madam of the Brothel."

"At the end of my course I realized there was no place for me in South Africa because I found it difficult to function in a society that considered 75% of population inferior, that my community frowned on me as an actress, and my beliefs for a non-racial society now incorporated a fight for the equality for women an anathema to my conservative Greek community. I did not want to spend my life apologizing for who I was."

"I arrived at as an undergraduate 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. My search for justice grew out of the pain I experienced when I saw the ridicule my malformed brother elicited. I became aware of the evil that is prejudice, a form of injustice. My urge to redress this prejudice took a more social dimension during my years as a boarder at St Dominic’s Convent, where the great Barbara Hogan matriculated a year later than me though I only got acquainted with her at Wits."

"My search for justice grew out of the pain I experienced when I saw the ridicule my malformed brother elicited. I became aware of the evil that is prejudice, a form of injustice."

"They`re powerful parts- all the most powerful parts seem to be written for men....Hamlet has this existentialist crisis .I had one when I was 17. Women are not given that kind of philosophy in their parts""

"I can say that my collaboration with Theatro Technis was a serious milestone in my life. I had the chance to work with George Eugeniou a great director who taught me a great deal"

"By the time I got a permit I found that I liked being independent, that I like to do productions that I think are valuable . I did not want to feel that I had left South Africa, my parents and a comfortable life to do rubbishy work"

"...this is not the only time that I have stuck out my neck for a Greek film director. With Nikos Nikolaidis I introduced him to Mr Constantini as well , and undertook to send his XXX-rated movie `Singapore Sling` to two of the top film agents in the UK , Jenny Cassarotto and PDF who have now changed their name on account of a merger. Ms Cassarotto was indulgent, but the other agent was so shocked that he treated me as if I was peddling porn. The things I've done for Greece!"

"Voulgaris asked me to find film funding for what was to be the last but unfinished film project of Elia Kazan,a personal friend of Voulgaris. The subject of the film was the immigration of the Kazan family from the beleaguered Greek minority communities under Turkish rule in Asia Minor to the safe haven of the USA where the Kazan family settled. 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. It is also because of these meetings that Paqndelis Voulgaris was able to make"The Brides". Elia Kazan was too old to get film insurance , so Kazan instead brought to Scorseses" the Voulgaris film project "The Brides" , and yet I have to this day never have had a thank you from him. So much for his saintly appearance."

"The reason the Internationalist Theatre productions demanded attention was that the directors who had already worked at top theatres like the Royal Court and the Royal Shakespeare Company had agreed to take the risk of directing classical plays with multi-racial casts , that the performance was of a very good standard, and furthermore that many prominent members of the arts establishment, Lindsay Anderson, Cameron MacKintosh, John Barton, Richard Eyre, the great casting director Mary Selway, Stephen Berkoff, Nicolas Roeg , came to see performances by Internationalist Theatre."

"This is the place (Wits University) where the tension between my parents and myself on account of my political beliefs became pronounced. 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. I ceased my political studies as I didn't wish to cause my parents any extra anxiety or stress ."

"Apart from the greatness of Bizos for his role in the dismantling of apartheid, defending Mandela etc , he also manifested a genius in his role as a leading member of the conservative South African Greek community, by drawing historical parallels between the 400 years of slavery that Greece had suffered under the Ottoman Turks and the 300 years or so of repression and cruelty suffered by the Southern African black tribes and mixed race people under the British and then under the Nationalist Afrikaner rule. By using this strategy Bizos was able to balance his fight for justice in South Africa, and synchronously lead the very conservative Greek community in a more progressive direction."

"... without New Testament Greek there would be no Christian Theology, or possibly no Christianity. 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 "."

"We had so little to eat, we were freezing all the time, but the sheer joy of being able to act fed our souls."

"The terrible consequences of being Jewish that my grandmother faced are ones endured by many ethnic groups, and must always be viewed as a brutal example of man's inhumanity to man. I feel honoured to be able to tell her incredible story of strife and survival."

"He had great ideas upon the importance of a regular and almost daily visit to the dentist. He himself went to a dentist as he would have gone to a hairdresser's, and he insisted that all the little girls he knew should go too."

"Even in mathematics his whimsical fancy was sometimes suffered to peep out, and little girls who learnt the rudiments of calculation at his knee found the path they had imagined so thorny set about with roses by reason of the delightful fun with which he would turn a task into a joy. But when the fun was over the little girl would find that she had learnt the lesson (all unknowingly) just the same. Happy little girls who had such a master."

"To have even known such a man as he was is an inestimable boon. To have been with him for so long as a child, to have known so intimately the man who above all others has understood childhood, is indeed a memory on which to look back with thanksgiving and with tears."

"It is not easy to make an effort and to remember all the little personalia of some one one has loved very much, and by whom one has been loved."

"He would, when engaged in an animated conversation with a friend, talk quickly and well for a few minutes, and then suddenly and without any very apparent cause would begin to stutter so much, that it was often difficult to understand him."

"He had a curiously womanish face, and, in direct contradiction to his real character, there seemed to be little strength in it."

"When the rest of the congregation rose at the entrance of the choir he kept his seat. He argued that rising to one's feet at such a time tended to make the choir-boys conceited."

"Love like that, any woman! If you get the chance, even if it may be a passing thing; even if the void seems all-encompassing when it comes, even if the heart bleeds almost to death, passionate love is worth it, it is worth it, it is worth all of it."

"The whole of time would not be long enough to tell you of my joy in being married to you. Joy is not measured just by lovely things: the birth of babies, the song of birds heard together, the fun of holidays — the lyrical-love of lying with you. Joy is to be found, too, in the relief after pain shared, in the good news following bad, in the knowledge of greater closeness after disaster."

"Never once since I met you have I been bored; never once have I not wanted you. And never once, even for a moment, have I not loved you with all my heart."

"People associate me with a time when movies were pleasant, when women wore pretty dresses in films and you heard beautiful music. I always love it when people write me and say "I was having a rotten time, and I walked into a cinema and saw one of your movies, and it made such a difference.""

"As a child, I was taught that it was bad manners to bring attention to yourself, and to never, ever make a spectacle of yourself … All of which I've earned a living doing."

"I can take long walks, as I understand Greta Garbo does, and no one interferes with my thoughts and tranquility. Come to think of it, the other day I was on Fifth Avenue in New York and I saw a woman who could very well have been Garbo; I was a bit tempted to go up to her, but then I thought, "My God, practice what you preach! If it is her, you'll be intruding — just the thing you don't like yourself.""

"You have to look at yourself objectively. Analyze yourself like an instrument. You have to be absolutely frank with yourself. Face your handicaps, don't try to hide them. Instead, develop something else."

"I'm half-Irish, half-Dutch, and I was born in Belgium. If I was a dog, I'd be in a hell of a mess!"

"Nothing is more important than empathy for another human being’s suffering. Nothing — not a career, not wealth, not intelligence, certainly not status. We have to feel for one another if we’re going to survive with dignity."

"Success is like reaching an important birthday and finding you're exactly the same."

"I can testify to what UNICEF means to children, because I was among those who received food and medical relief right after World War II, I have a long-lasting gratitude and trust for what UNICEF does."

"Living is like tearing through a museum. Not until later do you really start absorbing what you saw, thinking about it, looking it up in a book, and remembering — because you can't take it all in at once."

"I myself was born with an enormous need for affection and a terrible need to give it"

"I am more than ever awed and overwhelmed by the monumental talents it was my great, great privilege to work for and with. There is therefore no way I can thank you for this beautiful award without thanking all of them, because it is they who helped and honed, triggered and taught, pushed and pulled, dressed and photographed — and with endless patience and kindness and gentleness, guided and nurtured a totally unknown, insecure, inexperienced, skinny broad into a marketable commodity. I am proud to have been in a business that gives pleasure, creates beauty, and awakens our conscience, arouses compassion, and perhaps most importantly, gives millions a respite from our so violent world. Thank you, Screen Actors Guild and friends, for this huge honor — and for giving me this unique opportunity to express my deepest gratitude and love to all of those who have given me a career that has brought me nothing but happiness."

"It gave her a steely determination, a respect for what it takes to do it. I’ve heard her described as a steel fist in a velvet glove."

"Think about it. She was the first woman – with Elizabeth Taylor – to make a million dollars, at a time when women couldn’t open a bank account without their husbands. She could fight her corner. That was thanks to the war, the ballet, her mother."

"She is like a portrait by Modigliani where the various distortions are not only interesting in themselves but make a completely satisfying composite."