For each film in his loosely connected ‘Important Women’ trilogy, Pablo Larraín had just one actor in mind to play the title character. Here, Ian Haydn Smith explores why Angelina Jolie was the perfect performer to portray legendary opera singer Maria Callas.
For a drama that explores celebrity as a form of myth, Pablo Larraín’s new film opens in the most prosaic way. The body of world-renowned opera singer Maria Callas (Angelina Jolie) is found on the floor in her Paris apartment by her devoted, but harried, housekeeper (Alba Rohrwacher) and butler/chauffeur (Pierfrancesco Favino). Callas was just 53 when her heart gave out on 16 September 1977. By that point, she had transcended the vagaries of any average human existence; she had become as mercurial and reclusive a public figure as Greta Garbo, Howard Hughes or Thomas Pynchon.
Maria is a Proustian account of Callas’ last days, moving seamlessly through time as the singer reflects on her life, loves and achievements. It follows on the heels of Larraín’s Spencer (2021) and Jackie (2016), completing a biographical triptych about women who made an indelible impression upon late 20th-century culture, whose private and public lives were often blurred, and whose every move was the subject of intense media scrutiny. For Jackie, Spencer and now Maria, Larraín had only one actor in mind to play each of the eponymous roles.
His choice for Spencer was Kristen Stewart. The film focuses on the pivotal weekend at Sandringham, the British monarchy’s sprawling Norfolk retreat, when Princess Diana purportedly decided to escape her marriage to Prince Charles. Stewart had been the subject of the worst media intrusion by the time she played Princess Diana, adding a dimension to her performance that other actors may not have had the real-life experience to capture. The same can be said of Natalie Portman in Jackie. The drama’s action unfurls a week after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and is anchored by an interview between a journalist and Jacqueline, the President’s traumatised yet poised widow. Larraín believed that this story – of someone who had been thrust into the spotlight of US high society from a relatively young age – would resonate with Portman. Her career began when she was 12, so she had lived with fame for almost two decades by the time she began work on the film.
Spencer (2021)
Maria also pivots upon an interview with a journalist (Kodi Smit-McPhee). But his name, Mandrax – an alternative brand name for Quaalude, a powerful sedative that Callas regularly consumed – makes clear that, after the first session at least, these scattered conversations are imagined by the singer. As she moves through her apartment, or walks along the streets of her adopted city, Callas revisits key moments from her youth, celebrated performances throughout her career and encounters with a variety of characters in her life, most notably the shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis (a superb Haluk Bilginer), with whom she had a turbulent, years-long affair..
Shortly before the release of Spencer, which was written by Peaky Blinders and SAS Rogue Heroes creator Steven Knight, Larraín invited Angelina Jolie to a private screening of the film in LA. On leaving it, he proposed the idea of her playing Callas. Had she declined, Knight has said, the project would have been abandoned. Larraín saw no other actor of gravity who was capable of taking on the role. It was only when Jolie agreed that Knight started on the screenplay.
Jackie (2016)
Jolie’s persona – both in her professional and private life – has changed significantly over the years. Around the time of her Oscar-winning performance in Girl, Interrupted (1999) she possessed an energy and sense of anarchy that spilled off the screen. Outside of cinema, the next two decades saw her transform into a respected figure on the global stage as she fought for women’s rights, particularly in conflict zones. She also turned to directing, often embracing her worldly concerns in films such as In the Land of Blood and Honey (2011), First They Killed My Father (2017) and Without Blood (2024).
At the same time, her star persona developed in a way more commonly associated with the biggest icons of the Golden Age of Hollywood. Paparazzi and press stories notwithstanding, Jolie has forged an image that is simultaneously the pinnacle of Hollywood glamour and incredibly private, with just the right combination of remoteness and allure – everything, in fact, that defined Callas. Larraín saw in Jolie an actor who would not only understand the kind of life Callas led, but one who could channel the singer’s uniqueness, where myth and reality blur as the voraciousness of celebrity culture consumes every titbit of news, speculation or rumour.
Maria (2024)
Unlike Portman and Stewart, Jolie’s challenge not only lay in capturing the spirit and physical elements of her subject, she had to convey Callas’ artistry: her voice. Six months of breathing training, followed by another six with a singing coach, brought the actor to the point where she could perform as Callas; not at the height of the singer’s powers – such a feat would be impossible – but at the end of her life, when her talent was a spectre of what it had once been. In the edit, Larraín mixes Jolie’s voice with recordings of the young Callas as he moves between timelines. It highlights the actor’s incredible achievement. But her performance is equally crucial in the film’s quieter scenes as she conveys the complexity of her subject – whose public persona comes to dominate even her most intimate, private moments.
Callas herself, by contrast, has had little of her immense body of work captured on screen. Outside of three short films made in the late 1960s and recordings of her opera performances, her most significant cinematic role was playing the betrayed wife and murderous mother in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Medea (1969). A fairly faithful adaptation of Euripides’ tragedy, it finds Callas on startling form, fully embracing both the ambivalence and rancour of her character. But the film is also a paean, a love letter of sorts, from the director to his star. Callas transcended normality to a degree that made her playing this mythical role not just a natural choice for Pasolini, but an essential one. In the same way, Jolie’s performance moves beyond mere impersonation. She captures something ineffable in Callas and in doing so rewards Larraín with one of her finest screen performances, while he makes clear, in the film’s devastating final scenes, how the actor was the only person who could play this extraordinary figure.
WATCH MARIA IN CINEMAS
