“Like a lymphatic monkey!” This is how Elli Lampetti described her entry into life. Her twin brother, Takis, was ahead of a lively cry, but the Loukos family was struggling because the weak baby girl who followed an hour later was silent. “He won’t do it,” the nurse told the doctor, but he dived the baby alternately into two basins with cold and hot water until the crying of life was heard.
It was April 13, 1926. Tuesday and 13 said some later, when the diseases and losses of the family had to be attributed to prevention. The family from Villas Attica with the seven children, who all had artistic concerns, left his beloved home after some years, as the father’s tavern was not going well, and came to Athens.
“He doesn’t even make a comrade”
ELLI had decided for six years that she would become an actress and not to say it. In Athens, at the urging of her uncle, she took exams at the Drama School. He baptized her Lampetti, from the “Astrapogiannos” of Valaoritis. “This baby girl doesn’t even make a comrade,” said the Director of the National Theater School. It is also rejected at the Kotopouli School, with Marika herself in the committee, Spyros Mela, Eleni Halkoussi and Ferrelpi Zen Prelimier Takis Horn. There, her uncle advised her to say I. Griparis’ poem “The Praper”, but the difficult words made her light liar more intense.
From her surprise, she forgot her school bag on stage. When she returned to the empty room in search of her, she did not notice the chicken in the back seats. But she saw that the younger movement on stage was of theatrical interest. She took her schoolgirl and Elli distributed her day between the Exarchia High School and the Kotopouli Theater.
Marika admired every step of the young student who avoided improvisations as well as the ancient drama, but she received the “thumbs up” of her teacher. However, Kotopouli’s obvious sympathy created jealousy and gossip in the classroom. “Marika proclaim that I am a second Sarah Bernard! He interviewed me by praising me, “Lampetti told Frida Boubi (” The Last Performance “, ed. Exandas). Some interpreted the great protagonist’s interest differently. “What a vulgarity,” Lampetti said later.
When she decided to make spelling to correct her liar, Marika disagreed: “You will spoil the tool God gave you.” With this “tool” in 1942 she made her debut with Carlo de Fris’s “The Wedding Journey”. Three words said: “Mentes, candies, chocolates”. Takis Horn was also playing in the show.
Temporary withdrawal due to… love
The role where Lampetti shone and discussed for the first time was in the work of Georg Hauptman “Hanele goes to Paradise”. He loved the theater crazy, and yet, when he fell in love for the first time, he decided to give up. “I was a child and in a few days I became a woman,” he told the poet and diplomat Theodoros Sgourdelis – 20 years older, without ever mentioning his name. He used to say “the theater is not for you” and so, “I left the theater, I disappeared, I was lost from all over the world.” But when he insisted on following him in Paris, Lampetti refused and returned to the theater. Kotopouli, with her attitude, told her: “You have disappointed me, there is no role in my new distributions.”
He gave her, however, some second roles. So Lampetti accepted the proposal of Kostas Mousouris. “She is capable of drinking your blood for a bastard,” her teacher warned. In his troupe he played great roles, but her remuneration was really small. Then she met critic and director Mario Ploritis, who became her Pygmalion. Later her first husband, after mediated a stormy romance with young Aleko Alexandrakis.
Highlighting the art theater
Ploritis turned her to Charles Koun and the Art Theater, where he played works by Tennessee Williams, Anuig, Presley, O’Neil, Xenopoulos, Miller, Lorca and the young Enzeni became a great actress from 1946 to 1948. “I always remember Elli as an airman,” Kun had told Freddy Germanos. “The way she was talking and her movement had something more spooky.”
There Elli learned at the school of emotion and hypersensitivity, Kostas Georgousopoulos had pointed out. The interpretation then discussed was for the “glass world” and how a candle was extinguished. Sikelianos went to the theater every night to admire her. She was trained for a month in the evenings in the kitchen of her home to extinguish a candle, avoiding grimaces.
Lampetti had an interior in her interpretation. He created emotion, whether he was playing light comedies or deeper and more demanding roles. Mr. Georgousopoulos stressed that “he did not play a classic repertoire, he never played Shakespeare, he played very little Chekhov, but he played a modern theater, a boulevard and never ancient drama.”
She had an interior in her interpretation; she created emotion, either playing light comedies or deeper and more demanding roles.
After Koun collaborated with Katerina’s troupe, with the National Theater, she made her film debut in the film “Famous Slaves” directed by M. Ploritis and was awarded in 1951 with the Kotopouli Prize for “Heir” and “Heir”.
She liked the theater, the cinema ever
Source talent, charismatic, persistent, passionate, peculiar, had an urban refinement on stage, seemed fragile and at the same time emitted power and shine. She was a vulnerable woman struggling for theater, passions, men she loved and lived alongside death, experiencing the illnesses and losses of her beloved brothers.
“I always remember Elli as an airman,” Kun had told Freddy Germanos. “The way she was talking and her movement had something more spooky.”
She fell in love with the theater, loved by the lens, and the audience loved her interpretation, deep voice and her fragile grace in bulbar and deeper roles. He liked the theater, the cinema never. “Whatever I played, I played it to reinforce my finances (…) it seemed to me to be abusive …”. According to Mr. Georgousopoulos, the idiom of Lampetti “prospered more in cinema and was used by M. Kakogiannis.”
In 1953 the director suggested that she play with Horn, who disliked but admired on stage, on the “Sunday Awake”. External shooting took place in Greece and others in Egypt. They had begun to fall in love. “They stayed in” Me Chaos “, the best hotel in Cairo, in two suites communicating and coming to that shooting nystaleos and she withered,” says Michalis Kakogiannis in his biography “in the foreground” (ed. Psychogios) to Christos Siafkos. The director went to stay in the suite to control their nights, but it was futile. “Horn was 34 years old, in love and unstoppable. That smaller but flame. I was in love with her too, but I didn’t dare to think about it … (…) Her aura looked like a fragile and extremely sexual plasma, which could even faint with a touch. “
Returning to Athens, Lampetti separates from M. Ploritis. in which he had already confessed that he was in love with Horn. Their marriage has withstood two years, but their friendship to the end. But the “Divine Couple”, as the Lampetti -Horn couple called in 1959, is separated. The actress has been shaken by the death of her mother, her two brothers who lost cancer, Tuesday by a car accident and the loss of her friend and colleague George Pappas. It was also dissolved by something else. The abortion she did as Horn asked her, who didn’t want children.
Sweety Irma erases
In 1960 he marries American writer Frederic Wakeman, whom he met in the film “Lost Body” and signed the script. She had been captivated with her when she saw “the girl in black”, the “last lie”, the “story of a pound of pound”. In 1969 he was diagnosed with breast cancer. He is subjected to total mastectomy, struggles, hopes, trying to adopt Eliza with Wakehman, he seems happy. However, a court ruling obliges the couple to return the little girl to their natural parents. The adventure shocks her. In 1976 they divorced with Waikman after 16 years of marriage.
Her performances in “Autumn History” were special with Manos Katrakis, “Miss Margarita”, in “Six Monopters”. But cancer returns. In 1980 she undergoes chemotherapy that hit her voice. Her last role was the deaf Saras in 1981 in the “Children of a Lower God”. Two hours mute on stage, a silent interpretation recital. “Emotion went beyond logic and the enthusiasm was strong and spontaneous,” Aris Davarakis wrote in “Postman”.
Her last role was the deaf Saras in 1981 in the “Children of a Lower God”. Two hours mute on stage, a silent interpretation recital.
On September 3, 1983, he erased at Sinai Mountains in the US. He was 57 years old. But her voice still sweetens us in “Irma the sweet/ rag in the north/ Irma or sweet/ no longer exists”, in lyrics by Lefteris Papadopoulos and music by Yiannis Spanou. It was the only time she sang in her performance.
*Curated by: Evanthis Hatzivasiliou
