Irene Papas Parents: Meet Eleni Prevezanou And Stavros Lelekos

Irene Papas was a Greek actress and singer who starred in more than 70 films and had a career which span over 5 decades.

Irene Papas was born Irene Lelekou on Sept. 3, 1926 to parents Eleni Prevezanou and Stavros Lelekos in the village of Chiliomodi, outside Corinth, Greece.

Her mother, Eleni Prevezanou and father Stavros Lelekos were both teachers.

Her mother was a schoolteacher and her father, taught classical drama at the Sofikós school in Corinth.

Irene’s family moved to Athens when she was seven years old and she was educated from age 15 at the Royal School of Dramatic Art in Athens, taking classes in dance and singing.

She found the acting style advocated by the School old-fashioned, formal, and stylised, and she rebelled against it, causing her to have to repeat a year, eventually graduating in 1948.

Papas began her acting career in Greece in variety and traditional theatre, in plays by Ibsen, Shakespeare, and classical Greek tragedy, before moving into film in 1951.

Her breakout role came in the 1961 war film “The Guns of Navarone” alongside the likes of Gregory Peck, David Niven and Anthony Quinn. She played a World War II resistance fighter named Maria Pappadimos, who made the difficult decision to shoot an unarmed woman because she was working with the Nazis.

She also famously starred in the 1964 smash-hit “Zorba the Greek,” also starring Anthony Quinn, in which she played a Greek widow who is stoned by her fellow villagers for laying with the “wrong man.”

Papas’ other film credits include;

• “Tribute to a Bad Man” (1956) with James Cagney,
• “Bouboulina” (1959),
• “Electra” (1962),
• “The Brotherhood” (1968) opposite Kirk Douglas,
• The political thriller “Z” (1969),
• “Anne of the Thousand Days” (1969) and
• “Chronicle of a Death Foretold” (1987)

Sadly, Papas passed away on Sept. 14, 2022 aged 96.