There must have been worse ways of earning a living than passionately making love to the 22-year-old Brigitte Bardot on the beach of St Tropez. Christian Marquand, who has died aged 73, was a lucky man.The film was And God Created Woman (1956), and the steamy scene was directed watchfully by Bardot’s husband, Roger Vadim. Mostly shot on location, the rather silly, but certainly sensual, tale was a good excuse for him to display his wife’s amoral charms in various forms of dress, which mainly comprised jeans, and undress.
But the film also gave Marquand’s career a boost. Vadim’s debut movie tells of how Bardot, shortly after her marriage to a wimpish Jean-Louis Trintignant, finds she is more attractive to her dour but handsome brother-in-law, Marquand. Coincidentally in real life, Trintignant was to marry Marquand’s sister, Nadine, a few years later. But back on the beach, Bardot teases Marquand into ripping off her clothes and taking her.
The film created a scandal in France. This was mainly because of the discreet nudity of the beach scene, but Vadim complained that the censors forced him to cut the sequence.
Marquand himself was no stranger to scandal. The previous year he had a role in Marc Allègret’s Lady Chatterly’s Lover, which had starred Danielle Darrieux as the erring English aristocrat. In his private life, he married Tina, the daughter of Jean-Pierre Aumont and Maria Montez, in 1963, then had a son by the actress Dominique Sanda in the early 1970s. Thus he seemed to reflect his adulterous film persona.
One of his best pictures was Alexandre Astruc’s Une Vie (1958), based on a Guy de Maupassant story. In it, Marquand was the womanising husband of a young, innocent aristocrat, played by a cloying Maria Schell.
His affair with a friend’s wife (beautiful Antonella Lualdi) leads to his death. The main strength of the film, apart from Claude Renoir’s wonderful impressionistic Technicolor photography, was the way in which Marquand managed to find many nuances in the unsympathetic character he played.
Marquand was born in Marseilles, the son of a Spanish father and an Arab mother; the fact that he spoke Spanish, Arabic, French, English and Italian – all learned as a child – aided his international career. At the age of 21, his dark good looks got him a bit part in Jean Cocteau’s Beauty And The Beast (1946), and he was soon getting slightly bigger roles, such as the Bohemian officer friend of the caddish soldier hero (Farley Granger) in Luchino Visconti’s lush melodrama, Senso (1954).
In the 1960s, he moved with ease between films made in France and those coming out of Hollywood. Among the uninspiring latter were the D-Day epic, The Longest Day (1962), in which Marquand enlisted as part of the French contingent; Fred Zinnemann’s post-Spanish civil war film, Behold A Pale Horse (1964), in which he played a Spaniard; and, as the French doctor among the aircrash survivors, in Robert Aldrich’s The Flight Of The Phoenix (1966).
Marquand was better served by Claude Chabrol in The Road To Corinth (1967), in which he portrayed an American Nato security officer investigating mysterious boxes jamming US radar installations in Greece. In 1962, he made Of Flesh and Blood, a competent thriller featuring Anouk Aimée, and the first of two films he directed.
Marquand’s succès de scandale was Candy (1968), about the conquests of a nymphet, played by Ewa Aulin, and adapted by Buck Henry and Terry Southern from the latter’s novel. In the movie, a large international cast, including Marlon Brando, Richard Burton, John Huston, Walter Mathau, James Coburn, Charles Aznavour, Elsa Martinelli, Ringo Starr, and even the boxer Sugar Ray Robinson, did a series of star turns.
The result, according to the Monthly Film Bulletin, was that “hippy psychedelics are laid on with the self-destroying effect of an overdose of garlic”. Disappointed by this mainly negative reception, amidst the era of the love generation, Marquand returned to acting.
Tragically, in the early 1980s, however, he was struck by Alzeimer’s disease and retired from the world. He spent many of his last years in hospital, not knowing anybody who visited him. His sister, the director Nadine Trintignant, wrote a moving book about his plight, Ton Chapeau au Vestiaire (His Hat in The Cloakroom).
She survives him, as do his actor brother Serge Marquand, his former wife Tina Aumont, and his son.
Christian Marquand, actor; born March 15 1927; died November 22 2000
Sergio Fantoni – actor, dubbing actor, and director – would have turned 90 in August. He worked with the greatest directors, from Luchino Visconti to Blake Edwards, played in Hollywood, and got his fame from popular TV shows in the 1970s and 1980s like Anna Karenina, The Octopus and La coscienza di Zeno. His latest role was in TV series Il commissario Montalbano, in the episode “The Violin’s Voice.”
Born in Rome on 7 August 1930 from a family of artists, Fantoni first thought to become an engineer or an architect, but his passion for theatre was stronger. He started with some experimental theatre companies and in the 1970s, together with Luca Ronconi and his wife Valentina Fortunato, he founded one of the first independent theatre companies. On the big screen, he worked with directors such as Luchino Visconti (Senso), Francesco Maselli (The Dolphins with Claudia Cardinale), Giuliano Montaldo (Tiro al piccione and Sacco and Vanzetti).
He worked in Hollywood in the early 1960s in film such as Mark Robson’s The Prize, Von Ryan’s Express with Frank Sinatra, and Blake Edward’s What Did You Do in the War, Daddy? He also played in Peter Greenaway’s The Belly of an Architect.
His full-frontal nudity in Delitto di Stato, aired on Rai 2 in 1982, caused a scandal.
As a dubbing actor, he was the voice of American stars such as Marlon Brando (Apocalypse Now), Henry Fonda, Rock Hudson, and Ben Kingsley.
After an operation to the larynx in 1997, he dedicated himself to theatre direction. With playwright and director Ivo Chiesa and colleague Bianca Toccafondi in 2022 he won the Lifetime Achievement Award entitled to Ennio Flaiano
Sergio Fantoni died in Rome in 2020 at the age of 89.
Françoise Arnoul (born 3 June 1931) is a French actress, who achieved popularity during the 1950s.
Born Françoise Annette Marie Mathilde Gautsch in Algeria as the daughter of stage actress Janine Henry and artillery general Charles Gautsch, she has two brothers. While her father continued military service in Morocco, the rest of family moved to Paris in 1945. After learning drama there, she was noticed by director Willy Rozier, who offered her a major role in the film L’Épave (1949).
Arnoul starred in such films as Henri Verneuil‘s Forbidden Fruit (1952), Jean Renoir‘s French Can-Can (1954), Des gens sans importance (1956) with Jean Gabin, Henri Decoin‘s La Chatte (1958), Le Chemin des écoliers (1959) with Bourvil, and Jean Cocteau‘s Testament of Orpheus (1960). Later in life, she moved into television, appearing in different TV movies and mini-series and also turning to character parts. She published her autobiography entitled Animal doué de bonheur in 1995. In 1956, Arnoul was married to publicity agent Georges Cravenne whom she had met two years previously, but they separated in 1960.[4] From 1964, she became the companion of French director/scriptwriter Bernard Paul, a relationship which lasted until his death in 1980.
No matter what roles she played in films, on stage or on television throughout the rest of her career, the German actor Karin Dor, who has died aged 79, was labelled a Bond girl. Her induction as a member of this exclusive group of beautiful women who have provided James Bond with a love interest came in You Only Live Twice (1967), in which she met a memorably grisly end.
Karin Dor
Dor played the seductive, titian-haired Helga Brandt, an operative of the criminal organisation Spectre ordered to kill 007 (Sean Connery), who has been conveniently tied up for her. “I’ve got you now,” she states ambivalently. “Well, enjoy yourself!” he replies. She slaps his face and threatens him with a surgical knife, which he wrestles from her, using it to cut the strap on her black dress.
Helga expertly switches from being cold and calculating to passionately kissing Connery. She seems to have changed sides, though she makes a further attempt to kill Bond by trapping him in a booby-trapped plane, which she parachutes out of, before it crashes. When the super-villain Spectre boss Blofeld (Donald Pleasence) discovers that Bond has survived the crash, he activates a mechanism that dumps Helga into a tank filled with piranha fish, which eat her alive.
Dor also fails to survive to the end of Alfred Hitchcock’s Topaz (1969). A rare bright spot in one of Hitchcock’s most anonymous films, she is Juanita de Cordoba, a dark-haired anti-Castro resistant, her German accent notwithstanding, known as the widow of a “hero of the revolution”, a description that enables her to work undercover. When her activities are discovered, she is shot by her revolutionary lover, providing the film with its best visual sequence. As Juanita collapses onto a marble floor, her deep purple dress spreads beneath her like a pool of blood.Advertisement
Surprisingly, these high-profile roles in two English language commercial successes did not help Dor to achieve further international recognition. However, she was hugely popular in Germany and Austria throughout the 1960s, mainly in escapist action movies loosely based on the thrillers of Edgar Wallace (called Krimis from the German Kriminalfilm), and the western adventures of Karl May, co-starring the dubbed ex-Tarzan Lex Barker, almost all of them directed by her first husband, Harald Reinl.
Born Kätherose Derr in Wiesbaden, she studied acting and ballet at school and began in films as an extra. Her marriage at 18 to the Austrian director Reinl, 30 years her senior, gave her the chance to appear as a juvenile lead in numerous period melodramas and operettas such as The White Horse Inn (1960).
Apart from the Wallace and May series, Dor was a favourite fräulein in distress in several horror movies with Barker as the hero, including The Invisible Doctor Mabuse (1962), The Face of Fu Manchu (1965) and The Torture Chamber of Doctor Sadism (1967), the last two starring Christopher Lee as an evil mastermind.
In contrast to the range of the low-budget Krimis, horror spin-offs and German westerns, Dor starred as Brunhild in Reinl’s The Nibelungen, shown in two parts, Siegfried (1966) and Kriemhild’s Revenge (1967), an epic that required the use of 8,000 extras in one battle scene alone.
Dor took fewer and fewer film roles from the 70s onwards, although she did appear regularly in series on German television.
Her third husband, the stuntman George Robotham, died in 2007. Dor is survived by a son, the actor Andreas Renell, from her marriage to Reinl, which ended in divorce, as did her second marriage.
• Karin Dor (Kätherose Derr), actor, born 22 February 1938; died 6 November 2017
Her singing and acting careers span five decades, starting in 1961; initially, she was billed as a female version of Elvis Presley. She has a sultry vibrant contralto voice.[1][2] She had a minor hit in 1961 and a charting album in 1964, and scored a disco hit in 1979. In 2001, she recorded a critically acclaimed gospel album, and an album of Christmas songs in 2004.
Then came a 1962 remake of Rodgers and Hammerstein‘s musical State Fair, playing the “bad girl” role of Emily opposite Bobby Darin and Pat Boone. She had tested for the part of Margie, the “good girl”, but seemed too seductive to the studio bosses, who decided on the switch. The two roles represented two sides of her real-life personality – shy and reserved offstage, but wildly exuberant and sensuous onstage. In her autobiography, the actress wrote that she changed “from Little Miss Lollipop to Sexpot-Banshee” once the music began.
Her next starring role, as the all-American teenager Kim from Sweet Apple, Ohio, in Bye Bye Birdie (1963), made her a major star. The premiere at Radio City Music Hall, 16 years after her first visit to the famed theater, was a smash hit: the highest first-week grossing film to date at the Music Hall. Life put her on the cover for the second time and announced that the “torrid dancing almost replaces the central heating in the theater.” She was then asked to sing “Baby Won’t You Please Come Home” at President John F. Kennedy‘s private birthday party at the Waldorf-Astoria, one year after Marilyn Monroe‘s famous “Happy Birthday“.
Ann-Margret met Elvis Presley on the MGM soundstage when the two filmed Viva Las Vegas (1964). She recorded three duets with Presley for the film: “The Lady Loves Me”, “You’re The Boss”, and “Today, Tomorrow, and Forever”; only “The Lady Loves Me” made it into the final film and none of them were commercially released until years after Presley’s death, due to concerns by Colonel Tom Parker that Ann-Margret’s presence threatened to overshadow Elvis. Ann-Margret introduced Presley to David Winters, whom she recommended as a choreographer for their film. Viva Las Vegas was Winters’ first feature film choreography job and was his first of four movies with Presley, and his first of five films, including Kitten with a Whip (1964), Bus Riley’s Back in Town (1965), Made in Paris (1966), and The Swinger (1966), and two TV specials with Ann-Margret. Winters was nominated for the 1970 Emmy Award for Outstanding Achievement in Choreography for his CBS Television Special: Ann-Margret: From Hollywood with Love (1969)
In 1963, Ann-Margret guest-starred in a popular episode of the animated TV seriesThe Flintstones, voicing Ann-Margrock, an animated version of herself. She sang the ballad “The Littlest Lamb” as a lullaby and the (literally) rocking song, “Ain’t Gonna Be a Fool”. Decades later, she recorded the theme song, a modified version of the Viva Las Vegas theme, to the live-action film The Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas, in character as Ann-Margrock.
While working on the film Once a Thief (1965), she met future husband Roger Smith, who after his successful run on the private-eye television series 77 Sunset Strip, was performing a live club show at the Hungry i on a bill with Bill Cosby and Don Adams. That meeting began their courtship, which met with resistance from her parents.
Her red hair color (she is a “natural brunette”) was the idea of Sydney Guilaroff, a hairdresser who changed the hair color of other famous actresses such as Lucille Ball.
One Sheet; Movie Poster; Film Poster; Cinema Poster;
She was offered the title role in Cat Ballou (1965), but her manager turned it down without telling her. In March 1966, Ann-Margret and entertainers Chuck Day and Mickey Jonesteamed up for a USO tour to entertain U.S. servicemen in remote parts of Viet Nam and other parts of South-East Asia. She still has great affection for the veterans and refers to them as “my gentlemen”. Ann-Margret, Day, and Jones reunited in November 2005 for an encore of this tour for veterans and troops at Nellis Air Force Base, Nevada.
During a lull in her film career in July 1967, Ann-Margret gave her first live performance in Las Vegas, with her husband Roger Smith (whom she had married in 1967) taking over as her manager after that engagement. Elvis Presley and his entourage came to see her during the show’s five-week run and to celebrate backstage. From thereon until his death, Presley sent her a guitar-shaped floral arrangement for each of her Vegas openings. After the first Vegas run ended, she followed up with a CBS television special The Ann-Margret Show, produced and directed by David Winters on December 1, 1968, with guest-stars Bob Hope, Jack Benny, Danny Thomas, and Carol Burnett. Then, she went back to Saigon as part of Hope’s Christmas show. A second CBS television special followed, Ann-Margret: From Hollywood With Love, directed and choreographed by David Winters and produced and distributed by Winters’ company Winters-Rosen, with guest-stars Dean Martin and Lucille Ball. David Winters and the show were nominated for a Primetime Emmy in Outstanding Choreography.
On the set of The Train Robbers in Durango, Mexico, in June 1972, she told Nancy Anderson of Copley News Service that she had been on the “grapefruit diet” and had lost almost twenty pounds (134 to 115) eating unsweetened citrus.
On Sunday, September 10, 1972, while performing at Lake Tahoe, she fell 22 feet from an elevated platform to the stage and suffered injuries including a broken left arm, cheekbone, and jawbone. She required meticulous facial reconstructive surgery that required wiring her mouth shut and putting her on a liquid diet. Unable to work for 10 weeks, she ultimately returned to the stage almost back to normal.
Throughout the 1970s, Ann-Margret balanced her live musical performances with a string of dramatic film roles that played against her glamorous image. In 1973, she starred with John Wayne in The Train Robbers. Then came the musical Tommy in 1975, for which she was again nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress. In addition, she has been nominated for 10 Golden Globe Awards, winning five, including her Best Actress in a Musical or Comedy for Tommy. On August 17, 1977, Ann-Margret and Roger Smith traveled to Memphis to attend Elvis Presley’s funeral. Three months later, she hosted Memories of Elvis featuring abridged versions of the Elvis 1968 TV and Aloha from Hawaii specials.
Ann-Margret was an early choice of Allan Carr‘s to play the role of Sandy Dumbrowski in the 1978 film Grease. At 37 years old, she was ultimately determined to be too old to convincingly play the role of a high school student. Olivia Newton-John got the role instead, and the character was renamed “Sandy Olsson” (after Ann-Margret’s birth surname) in her honour.
She also starred in the TV movies Who Will Love My Children? (1983) and a remake of A Streetcar Named Desire (1984). These performances collectively won her two Golden Globe Awards and two Emmy nominations. In 1985’s Twice in a Lifetime she portrayed the woman Gene Hackman’s character left his wife for. The next year she appeared as the wife of Roy Scheider‘s character in the crime thriller 52 Pick-Up. In 1987 she co-starred with Elizabeth Ashley (and also with Claudette Colbert, in the last on-screen role of the film legend’s career) in the NBC 2-part series “The Two Mrs. Grenvilles“. It earned Ann-Margret another Emmy Award nomination, this time for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Mini Series or a Special.
In 1989, an illustration was done of Oprah Winfrey that was on the cover of TV Guide, and although the head was Oprah’s, the body was referenced from a 1979 publicity shot of Ann-Margret. The illustration was rendered so tightly in color pencil by freelance artist Chris Notarile that most people thought it was a composite photograph.[27]
In 1991, she starred in the groundbreaking Our Sons opposite Julie Andrews as mothers of sons who are lovers, one of whom is dying of AIDS. In 1992, she co-starred with Robert Duvall and Christian Bale in the Disney musical, Newsies. In 1993, Ann-Margret starred in the hit comedy Grumpy Old Men reuniting with Matthau and Jack Lemmon. Her character returned for Grumpier Old Men (1995), the equally successful sequel which this time co-starred Sophia Loren.
Ann-Margret published an autobiography in 1994 titled Ann-Margret: My Story, in which she publicly acknowledged her battle with and ongoing recovery from alcoholism. In 1995, she was chosen by Empire as one of the 100 Sexiest Stars in film history; she ranked 10th.
She also filmed Any Given Sunday (1999) for director Oliver Stone, portraying the mother of football team owner Cameron Diaz. She filmed a cameo appearance for The Limey, but her performance was cut from the movie.
Ann-Margret also starred in several television films, including Queen: The Story of an American Family (1993) and Life of the Party (1999), the latter of which she received nominations for an Emmy Award, a Golden Globe Award, and a Screen Actors Guild Award.
She made guest appearances on the television shows Touched by an Angel in 2000 and three episodes of Third Watch in 2003. In 2001, she made her first appearance in a stage musical, playing the character of brothel owner Mona Stangley in a new touring production of The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas. The production co-starred Gary Sandy and Ed Dixon. She played Jimmy Fallon‘s mother in the 2004 comedy Taxi, co-starring Queen Latifah. In 2001, Ann-Margret worked with Art Greenhaw on the album God Is Love: The Gospel Sessions. The critically acclaimed project resulted in her first Grammy Award nomination and first Dove Award nomination for Best Album of the Year in a Gospel category. They teamed up again in 2004 for the album Ann-Margret’s Christmas Carol Collection. She performed material from the album at two auditorium church services at Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove, California, and broadcast worldwide on the program Hour of Power.
Ann-Margret guest-starred in an episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, “Bedtime“, which first aired on March 31, 2010 on NBC.[31] She received her sixth Emmy nomination for her performance. She also appeared in the Lifetime series, Army Wives, in the episode “Guns and Roses” (season four, episode five), which originally aired May 9, 2010. On August 29, 2010, she won an Emmy Award for Guest Performance by an Actress for her SVU performance. It was the first Emmy win of her career, and she received a standing ovation from the Emmy venue audience as she approached the stage to receive her award.
On October 14, 2010, Ann-Margret appeared on CBS’ CSI.
In Fall 2011 she co-starred with Andy Williams for a series of concerts at his Moon River Theater in Branson, Missouri. These proved to be Williams’ last performances before his death in 2012.
In 2014, she began appearing in a recurring role in the Showtime original series Ray Donovan.[33] On October 1, 2018, it was announced that she had joined the second season of the Syfy series Happy! in a recurring role.[
In 2018, she guest-starred in The Kominsky Method, portraying Diane, a widow and possible love interest for the recently widowed Norman, played by Alan Arkin.
Ann-Margret has no children, but she was stepmother to the three children of husband Roger Smith, an actor who later became her manager. She and Smith were married from May 8, 1967 until his death on June 4, 2017. Prior to this, she dated Eddie Fisher and was romantically linked to Elvis Presley during the filming of Viva Las Vegas.
A keen motorcyclist, Ann-Margret rode a 500 cc Triumph T100C Tiger in The Swinger (1966) and used the same model, fitted with a nonstandard electric starter, in her stage show and her TV specials. She was featured in Triumph Motorcycles‘ official advertisements in the 1960s. She suffered three broken ribs and a fractured shoulder when she was thrown off a motorcycle in rural Minnesota in 2000.[36]
The 2005 CBS miniseries Elvis includes the story of her affair with Elvis Presley during the filming of Viva Las Vegas. She was portrayed by actress Rose McGowan.
The Flintstones had a character named Ann-Margrock on the episode “Ann-Margrock Presents”, as a reference to Ann-Margret, for which she supplied the voice and the vocals. Ann-Margret was also referenced in Mad Men’s Season 3 Episode 3 “My Old Kentucky Home” and Season 3 Episode 4 “The Arrangement”. The “Bye Bye Birdie” video was shown in the show featuring her.
Melina Mercouri obituary from “The Independent” in 1994.
Maria Amalia Mercouris (Melina Mercouri), actress and politician: born Athens 18 October 1920; Member of Parliament (Pasok) for Piraeus 1977- 94; Minister of Culture and Sciences 1981-89, 1993-94; married 1942 Panayiotis Harokopos, 1966 Jules Dassin; died New York City 6 March 1994.
IN 1983 Melina Mercouri delivered the Herbert Read Memorial Lecture at the ICA, writes Peter Thompson. As she was already Greece’s Minister of Culture, and on a private visit, she did her best to steer clear of controversy. But nobody would have missed her meaning when she closed by apologising for her accent and added: ‘I hear it and am reminded of what Dylan Thomas said of a British broadcaster: ‘He speaks as if he had the Elgin Marbles in his mouth.’ ‘
The then director of the British Museum, Sir David Wilson, was in the audience that night. At the reception afterwards he found himself sharing a sofa with Mercouri and manfully keeping up his end of a vigorous – and anything but uncontroversial – conversation. His gallantry, however, became ever more tight-lipped as Mercouri’s campaign for the return of the Parthenon Marbles (she contemptuously rejected the term ‘Elgin Marbles’) gathered pace, even though she insisted her quarrel was with the British government, not the British Museum.
Melina Mercouri grew up in a household drenched with politics. Her grandfather was elected Mayor of Athens a record four times, and her father was a left-wing MP in the difficult period after the Greek civil war. Her happy marriage to the film director Jules Dassin was infused with his own radical and unwavering intellectual commitment.
By chance Mercouri was playing in a musical on Broadway when that infamous band of colonels staged their coup d’etat against Greek democracy in April 1967. From the start she was in the front line of the expatriate struggle for their overthrow, and joined the handful of those deprived of their citizenship by Brigadier Pattakos, the junta’s Interior Minister. ‘I was born a Greek, and I will die a Greek. Pattakos was born a Fascist and will die a Fascist,’ was her riposte.
Her home in Paris became an open house for Greek political exiles, whatever their party affiliations, but the first anniversary of the coup she spent in London, addressing a rally of some 20,000 people in Trafalgar Square which will not be forgotten by anyone who was there.
So when in 1974 the colonels finally departed in ignominy, Mercouri was well set for a political career. She joined forces with Andreas Papandreou’s Panhellenic Socialist Movement (Pasok), and three years later was elected MP in the working-class port city of Piraeus. She wore her wealth with ease, was proud that her male constituents accepted her as an equal, and campaigned spectacularly both for practical neighbourhood improvement and for the advancement of women’s rights in a still largely macho society.
When Pasok won the 1981 elections, Mercouri was appointed Minister of Culture, a post she uniquely retained throughout the eight years of socialist rule. What had been a marginal ministry leapt on to the front pages. Among her successes were the impetus given to cultural activity in the provinces, while she most regretted her inability to win a greater share of state budget for the arts. Above all, though, her ministry became an exciting place, buzzing with ideas and enthusiasm, and drawing on talent and energy rather than political loyalty.
Mercouri brought the same dynamism and eagerness to international cultural co-operation, particularly within the EC, where she was much helped by her friendship with Francois Mitterrand and Jack Lang. During the Greek presidency in 1983 she initiated regular meetings of the community’s Culture ministers, and can also take credit for the institution of Cultural Capitals of Europe. Athens was the first such Cultural Capital in 1985.
But it was with the Parthenon Marbles campaign that her name became synonymous. And what a campaign it was. With Mercouri’s glamour and sense of drama to spearhead it, and an erudite and energetic British lobby to disseminate it, the cause penetrated people’s awareness so deeply that it even provided a theme for political cartoons dealing with the 1983 general election in Britain. After any number of leading articles, television documentaries, opinion polls, diplomatic demarches, and an Oxford Union debate, as well as a new book on the subject, it was still making news 10 years later.
Mercouri summed up the argument for the return of the Marbles in her closing words to the Oxford Union: ‘We say: ‘You have kept those sculptures for almost two centuries. You have cared for them as well as you could, for which we thank you. But now in the name of fairness and morality please give them back.’ I believe such a gesture from Great Britain would ever honour your name.’
Mercouri remained loyal to Pasok through all its tribulations after the party lost the 1989 election. She had tribulations of her own, fighting a battle against cancer, but was re-elected to Parliament in 1989, and came close to being elected Mayor of Athens the following year. When Papandreou returned to power last October he re- appointed her Minister of Culture. At one of her last election rallies she told the Athenians: ‘You can be sure the Parthenon Marbles will come back to their home.’ She would have liked nothing better than to live to see it happen.
On 8 October 1962,[4] Mercouri appeared on the American TV show What’s My Line. After the panel were blindfolded, a strange man appeared on-stage and proclaimed himself “the second mystery guest”. Host John Charles Daly quickly called for “the relieving crew” and said “schedule two” (a code word used on live broadcasts in case of an emergency: the cameras are turned to a neutral position and the sound is cut off). The man talked a bit about a dating service he apparently owned before being hustled off the stage by announcer Johnny Olson and executive producerGil Fates. Daly apologized to the panel and the program continued.[5]
Mercouri concentrated on her stage career for the following years, playing in the Greek productions of The Threepenny Opera and, for a second time, Sweet Bird of Youth, in addition to the ancient GreektragediesMedea andOresteia. She retired from film acting in 1978, when she played in her last film, A Dream of Passion, directed by her husband, Jules Dassin. Her last performance on stage was in the opera Pylades at the Athens Concert Hall in 1992, portraying Clytemnestra.
