The tragic life of opera singer Maria Callas is set to be laid bare in a new biopic with Angelina Jolie at the helm in what is set to be an incredibly agonizing look at the harrowing trauma that lurked beneath the musician’s glamorous public image.
Fans at the time branded the brunette beauty as The Divine and she embraced it with open arms, once telling her devotees: ‘I have been touched by the hand of God.’
But it seems as though, if anything, Callas was more cursed than blessed.
Throughout her life, it was a similar story: a veneer of incredible professional success, acclaim, glamour and wealth concealing an undercurrent of misery and degradation.
Her glittering life was marred by suffering and betrayal – she was swindled by her husband and father, regularly drugged and sexually assaulted by her violent lover, and blackmailed by a mother who tried to force her into prostitution.
Here, FEMAIL has laid bare the tragic tale of the star who was one of the most renowned and influential opera singers of the 20th century.
Maria Callas was mistreated by her family from an early age – with her mother even trying to force her into prostitution
Callas, who was born Sophie Cecilia Kalos in 1923 in New York to poor Greek immigrant parents George and Litsa, became used to her family mistreating her long before the men in her life did the same.
She was singing arias from Carmen by the time she was ten and her mother continually pestered the young Callas to perform for others.
In 1937, with her marriage disintegrating, Litsa moved back to Athens with Maria and her older sister Jackie.
During World War II, she helped shelter British officers — while prostituting herself to Italian and German soldiers to make ends meet, and pressured her daughters to do the same.
Although Jackie gave in, Maria managed to persuade the occupying soldiers to pay her simply for singing for them — she had started her musical training in Greece aged 13 — but she ‘never forgave’ her mother.
In 1945, Callas returned to the U.S. to be reunited with her father and to audition — successfully — for the Metropolitan Opera in New York.
She quickly became a star and was known for her incredible range on stage.
But her mother, who had always favored the slim, pretty Jackie over Maria, tried to monopolize on the success.
She attempted to emotionally blackmail her famous daughter by threatening suicide and leaking stories to the press about being abandoned.
Her father, who had opened a pharmacy in New York, also shamelessly sponged off his daughter, once even pretending to be dying.
And, despite her imperious, tantrum-filled behavior as a diva — once ripping up her entire wardrobe the night before a dress rehearsal — Callas was vulnerable to those who showed her affection.
‘With kindness, people can get anything from me, can make me foolish,’ she claimed.
The star married ‘predator’ Giovanni Battista Meneghini who she claimed ‘robbed’ her of more than half her money
Callas had hoped that she would find unconditional love with Italian entrepreneur husband Giovanni Battista Meneghini.
He has previously been portrayed as the one decent man in her life but was also ‘highly predatory,’ according to biographer Lyndsy Spence, author of Cast A Diva: The Hidden Life Of Maria Callas.
Callas was 23 and so penniless she couldn’t even afford a coat when she met him at an opera festival in Verona where his brother-in-law, the festival’s official doctor, was on the lookout for pretty singers to direct the ageing businessman’s way.
Despite him being 27 years her senior, the couple married in 1949 and he is credited with loving her and nurturing her career.
However, Spence says Callas ‘always wanted to retire and have a baby’ but her husband kept her working, ‘swindling her for years’ as her agent.
He ferreted much of the money away in Swiss bank accounts or used it to pay off his debts.
When she discovered what he had done, she described him as her ‘pimp.’
‘My husband is still pestering me after having robbed me of more than half my money by putting everything in his name since we were married,’ she wrote in one letter. ‘I was a fool… to trust him.’
He also cheated on her in the bedroom, seducing a string of young women sopranos aged 19 or 20.
The singer fell into the arms of inveterate womanizer Aristotle Onassis
Given the turbulent nature of her marriage, it is not surprising, perhaps, that Callas traded Meneghini in for the wolfishly charming Greek shipping tycoon Aristotle Onassis.
He was an inveterate womanizer who once claimed he approached every woman as a potential mistress.
The pair first met at a ball in Venice in 1957 where Callas found him physically unappealing and unnervingly over-attentive.
He pursued her with bucket loads of flowers signed ‘The Other Greek.’ Callas didn’t try to put him off, admitting she was ‘happy to be pursued by a man no longer young but still predatory, still sexy, still stalking.’
Their relationship wasn’t consummated until the summer of 1958 when Callas and Meneghini joined Sir Winston Churchill and his family for a fateful three-week cruise on the lavish Onassis yacht, Christina, hosted by the tycoon and beautiful wife Tina.
Her diva behavior had now reached unbearable levels, with her writing to friends: ‘I like travelling with Winston Churchill. It relieves me of some of the burden of my popularity.’
Once freed of their respective spouses, Callas soon came to see the real Onassis, who returned her slavish devotion with a mixture of contempt, violent anger and lack of interest.
He ‘tortured’ her emotionally and physically during their relationship before cruelly and infamously dumping her for Jackie Kennedy whom he married in 1968.
From the diaries of a close friend of Callas, autobiographer Spence discovered that Onassis would ply the singer with the powerful hypnotic sedative methaqualone, also known as Mandrax, to which she became addicted along with Nembutal, a barbiturate used as a pre-anesthetic.
She took it willingly, but with Callas effectively sedated, Onassis — whose ‘depraved’ sexual requests shocked even the notorious Paris brothel keeper Madame Claude — was able to sexually abuse the singer in demeaning ways that she wouldn’t have permitted if she had been fully conscious.
Spence also claimed Callas was at the time already suffering from ‘mental health issues’ as she coped with the twin pressures of her career and ageing.
The pressures were compounded by her discovery that Onassis was making heavy use of Madame Claude’s ‘girls’ and even had the bedroom at his Paris home decorated like a brothel.
It was to remind women, he said, of what they were.
‘The best girl is a girl you never see again,’ was a favorite Onassis maxim.
He was ugly and crude but Onassis exuded a powerful sexual magnetism and Callas was unable to resist.
He had a preference for emaciated, androgynous-looking women and Callas — who was prone to weight gain and suffered from eating disorders throughout her life — responded by going on a dangerous crash diet, weighing every morsel of food and becoming emaciated herself so she could ‘fit his ideal.’
The singer became pregnant with his baby in early 1960 but, according to a letter to her lawyers, she suffered a miscarriage.
‘It’s not difficult to be swept off one’s feet. Living with the consequences, that’s the hard part,’ Callas later observed.
By the time Aristotle Onassis left Callas for JFK’s widow Jackie Kennedy in 1968, his relationship with Callas was so toxic that he once hit her in the face in front of horrified guests, shouting: ‘You’re only good for f***ing. And you’re not even good for that any more.’
The singer retreated from the spotlight and lived out her final days in her Paris home addicted to pills
Callas was already on the path to drug addiction before becoming embroiled with Onassis.
In New York, she had met the infamous Max Jacobson, known as Dr Feelgood, who treated celebrities with injections to increase their stamina.
Unfortunately, his ‘vitamin shots,’ which were ‘highly addictive,’ were laced with amphetamines and methamphetamines.
As her voice declined, Callas retreated to her Paris home, addicted to pills, and spending her days watching TV and eating ice cream, with sister Jackie for company.
It has been claimed that her final days were a ‘tortuous routine of loneliness, introspection and regret.’
Callas died of a heart attack in 1977 aged only 53.
The biographer tracked down a neurologist who was treating her before her death and who revealed that Callas had long suffered from dermatomyositis – an inflammatory disease that affected the central nervous system and caused progressive muscle weakness.
Back in the 1950s, however, doctors had dismissed her as a hypochondriac.
If properly treated, her biographer claimed she wouldn’t have had to turn to the sleeping pills that devastated her life and nor would she have lost her singing voice, ending her career prematurely.
‘Her life was full of tragedy,’ Spence concluded.
