You know, I could claim that we named our daughter after her; who’d know? (She’s actually named after Irene Adler.) And there would be no shame in it, at least from me, because Irene Papas is a talented actress and a fierce advocate for human rights. I’ll admit she’s also one of those “she’s still alive?” types, and also she’s a bit obscure for Americans. I haven’t seen more than a handful of her films, either, and she’s inextricably linked in my head to one of the few English-language films she made—and I’m not sure it’s the one she’d be proudest of. Still, she is phenomenally talented and still alive.

She was actually discovered by Elia Kazan, when he was still working in Greece. She made movies for decades, performing with a fierce intensity seldom matched. She is probably best known to American viewers without my Disney fixation from Guns of the Navarone or Zorba the Greek, but she also performed in a wide array of Greek movies, including various adaptations of mythology and of course Z, where she plays the main character’s widow.

There are a lot of reasons given for why she wasn’t a bigger success—for one, she’s 5’10”, and actors might not have wanted to appear opposite such a tall woman. For another, there was that intensity. The Moon-Spinners is a strange example for this, but there it is; she is, in that movie, a widow who is trying to raise a young son and open a hotel. She did not know until quite recently that her brother is a crook, and now, she is trying to cope with the fact that the money he’s been sending her all these years was likely not honest. But she still wants to be a good person and raise her son to be honest. She’s a minor character, but she gives the role her all.

The depressing thing is that of course all the reasons I’ve read for why she wasn’t more successful have to do with her male costars. I don’t know; for all I know, she’s had just the amount of career she wants. But it’s rather taken for granted that the career of a strong, talented woman could be hamstrung because she’s too strong and too talented for the men she appeared opposite, which is disheartening even if, in her specific case, it isn’t true. In short, it might not be true, but it could be.

I wonder, too, if some of it is her passionate resistance to the Greek government. In 1967, she called for a “cultural boycott” of her own homeland and referred to the government as “the Fourth Reich.” She was a member of the Communist Party; I don’t know if she still is or not, but my goodness but that could be a damper on an American career. I also kind of wonder what Elia Kazan thought of it.

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