The real story behind Netflix's 'Maria' is packed with romantic drama
If you're a fan of famous women playing famous women dealing with emotional trauma (a very important fandom, mind you!), have I got the film for you. Maria is the third movie in director Pablo Larraín's series about 20th century icons, and it stars Angelina Jolie as Maria Callas. (Pablo previously directed 2016's Jackie starring Natalie Portman as Jacqueline Kennedy and 2021's Spencer starring Kristen Stewart as Princess Diana. For their roles, Natalie and Kristen were both nominated for Oscars for Best Actress, and Angelina is already expected to complete the trifecta with a nomination of her own.)
If you want to learn more about who the real Maria Callas was before watching Angelina's latest acclaimed performance—which hits Netflix on 11 December and the cinemas on 10 January, here's an introduction to the renowned opera singer.
Who was the real Maria Callas?
Maria Callas was a Greek-American opera singer, born in New York City on December 2, 1923. When she was 13, she moved with her mother to Greece. According to English National Opera, Maria started her career as a performer in the early 1940s, and she went on to become one of the most celebrated opera singers of the 20th century, performing at top venues of London, New York, and Milan. She also had a reputation for being a diva (which, let's be real, seems appropriate for an opera singer). According to The New York Times, she once said "I will always be as difficult as necessary to achieve the best."
Maria was a soprano and was known for her unique voice, which began to deteriorate by the late 1950s.
What happened to the real Maria Callas?
The movie Maria focuses on the later period of the singer's life when she was performing less and living in Paris. She mostly retired from singing by the 1960s. According to The New Yorker, she had "a flurry of troubled performances in 1964-65" and then "a disastrous concert tour in 1973-74." She ultimately died of a heart attack in 1977 at only 53 years old.
What was Maria Callas' personal life like?
Maria's life overlaps with that of one of director Pablo Larraín's previous subjects: Jacqueline Kennedy. Maria was married to Giovanni Battista Meneghini from 1949 to 1959. Toward the end of their marriage, she began an affair with billionaire shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis. They subsequently dated for nearly a decade before Aristotle left her and married Jacqueline in 1968.
Summing up how her talent and personal life both kept her in the limelight, her obituary in The Guardian reads, "The 'divine Callas' was the international symbol of prima donnas, as much for her incomparable voice as for her tantrums and her long love affair with the Greek ship owner Aristotle Onassis." (Juicy, if somewhat reductive. This was written in 1977, after all.)
Anyone else now counting down the days until this one is available to watch?
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