The biopic Maria is an ode to an opera legend and a method icon-OxBig News Network

With the discharge of Pablo Larraín’s new biopic Maria, starring Angelina Jolie, the world is as soon as once more drawn into the lifetime of Greek-American opera legend Maria Callas, whose artistry, ambition and isolation had been inseparable from her fantasy. The movie premiered on the 81st Venice International Film Festival on August 29, 2024 and has been streaming on Lionsgate Play in India since May 9, 2025.

A childhood marked by battle

Maria Anna Cecilia Kalogeropoulos was born in New York in 1923 to Greek immigrant dad and mom. Her childhood was marred by household discords and poverty. When her dad and mom separated, her mom took Maria and her sister again to Athens, simply earlier than World War II. Life in wartime Greece was bleak, however inside that panorama, a outstanding voice got here into being.

Maria educated at Athens Conservatoire below soprano Elvira de Hidalgo, who noticed not solely the potential however the ferocity in her voice. She practised obsessively, remoted from mates, fuelled by her mom’s ambition and her personal rising starvation for greatness. She would later say her youth was stolen from her by music.

A meteoric rise

Her skilled debut got here within the Forties in Athens, however it was in post-war Italy that her legend began to crystallise. By the age of 25, Maria had conquered the main Italian levels, singing with an depth that audiences had not seen in many years. At Milan’s Teatro alla Scala, she redefined operatic appearing.

Maria introduced Bel Canto opera — lengthy thought-about ornamental and outdated — again into cultural prominence. In works by Bellini, Donizetti and early Verdi, she discovered emotional depth. Her Norma was torn between motherhood and priestly obligation. Her Lucia descended into insanity with devastating realism. These weren’t simply performances. They had been revelations.

Her voice was uncommon: expansive in vary, unstable in color, able to each lyrical delicacy and volcanic power. Critics typically referred to as it uneven. But even those that questioned her method admitted they might not look away.

Glamour and grit

By the Fifties, Maria had change into a worldwide superstar. Her drastic weight reduction remodeled her bodily and visually aligned her with the ‘fashion elite’. Designers comparable to Dior and Biki dressed her, photographers pursued her, and tabloids devoured each element of her life.

But the transformation was not with out price. Many believed her voice grew to become fragile after the bodily change. Others pointed to the sheer emotional toll her performances exacted. Either approach, her profession started to sluggish by the early Sixties.

Offstage, her relationship with the Greek delivery magnate, Aristotle Onassis, made headlines. When he left her for Jacqueline Kennedy, Maria was devastated. Those who knew Maria, mentioned she by no means recovered emotionally, although she hardly ever spoke about it in public.

Jolie’s Maria

In her ultimate years, Maria withdrew from limelight, residing in solitude in her Paris condo. Friends famous her rising frailty (bodily and emotional). She hid her ache behind darkish glasses and tailor-made fits.

It is that this fragile, human aspect that director Pablo Larraín explores in Maria, his introspective biopic starring Angelina Jolie. Set totally within the final years of the singer’s life, the movie avoids the grandeur of her profession, and as an alternative, lingers on the quiet rituals of reminiscence: letters, outdated movies, echoes of applause. Angelina’s portrayal, knowledgeable by months of archival analysis, is inward and dignified. She performs Maria, not as a legend, however as a girl who as soon as commanded the stage, however now, wrestles with silence.

What emerges is just not a portrait of a diva, however of a girl confronting the ghosts of her former self.

A legacy etched in sound

Maria died in 1977, on the age of 53. Her ashes had been scattered within the Aegean Sea, not removed from the land that had formed her identification. In 2023, Athens inaugurated the Maria Callas Museum, marking her centenary with a set of private objects, costumes, recordings and letters. The museum displays not solely her inventive legacy however her enduring relevance to opera, theatre and efficiency.

Her recordings stay broadly studied and offered. Even immediately, no soprano can sing Tosca, Norma or La Traviata with out going through comparability to Maria. But her affect is just not measured solely in sound. She modified the expectations of what an opera singer may very well be: not merely a singer, however an actor, a thinker and a human being on stage.

Angelia Jolie within the biopic
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Perhaps that’s the reason Maria Callas nonetheless issues. Not as a result of she was flawless, however as a result of she was fearless.