There are not a lot of pictures of Maria Vacratsis online. She’s one of those actresses whom you mostly get crowd shots with other people at best. Or other people in things she’s in. Her episode of a TV show but not the character she played. A crowd shot from a movie that she may or may not even be in, but she’s certainly not in the center of the image, because she never really was. I can’t even find a detailed enough plot summary of several things she did to figure out who she was playing and what they had to do with anything.
Vacratsis is Canadian. She appears to be one of those people who got into acting to have something to do after the kids were in school or similar, given she was born in 1955 and her IMDb page starts in 1984. She’s done some stage acting, but nobody seems to have much information about that, either. There’s an official Instagram page, and she appears on a few fan wikis, but she’s one of those people who it’s likely you’re only hearing about for the first time here.
Unless, I suppose, you’re a DeGrassi fan. Vacratsis is in the great world of insular Canadian acting, probably most notably for three seasons as a lunch lady on DeGrassi. She did Due South once and Slings & Arrows, and honestly she made the rounds of Canadian TV just in general. Of course she did a Murdoch Mysteries. I’m always more surprised when I see Canadian actors who haven’t. Also Wind at My Back and Little Mosque on the Prairie and Schitt’s Creek. When Canadian shows need a woman of Greek ancestry, there she is.
The Greek ancestry also, of course, means she was in My Big Fat Greek Wedding and the assorted sequels no one’s seen. Perhaps surprisingly, she only did one of the Mamma Mia movies. Most of her other movies are Canadian. She’s got four credits in common with Graham Greene, one of my other Canadian Career Litmus Tests. The Americans only seem to come calling when they’re casting a lot of Greek people.
The other place you might know her, because of the strange nature of anime dubbing into English, is in the original English-language dub of Sailor Moon. She was several characters on the show, most notably Negaforce. She’s done a little voicework beyond that, but only a little. This still means that, between DeGrassi fans and Sailor Moon fans, she’ll never be forgotten.
