Amalia Moutousi

Amalia Moutousi was born in Athens into a theatre family: her mother is the actress Nonika Galinea, and her sister Arietta Moutousi is also an actress. She studied at the drama school of Karolos Koun’s Art Theatre (Θέατρο Τέχνης) and then continued her training in New York, at HB Studio and at William Esper’s acting school.

Back in Athens she co-founded the Thission Theatre (Θέατρο Θησείον), which worked from 1985 to 1998, and appeared in all of its productions directed by Michail Marmarinos, among them Euripides’ Medea, Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Sophocles’ Electra. In all she spent about twenty years with Marmarinos and the composer Dimitris Kamarotos. She also worked closely with the director Lefteris Vogiatzis, in Sarah Kane’s Cleansed (2000), Sophocles’ Antigone (2007) and Molière’s Amphitryon (2012), and with directors such as Yannis Kokkos, Yannis Houvardas, Thomas Moschopoulos, Dimiter Gotscheff and Yorgos Lanthimos.

Teaching has run alongside the stage. She taught acting at the University of Patras and at the Embros theatre school between 1995 and 2000, and in 2015 she was teaching at the drama school of the Athens Conservatoire (Ωδείο Αθηνών). For the National Theatre of Greece she has also co-led an International Ancient Drama Workshop at Epidaurus, built around a choral ode from Sophocles’ Antigone.

Moutousi’s career rests above all on ancient tragedy, often in large open-air theatres. She played Electra in the Oresteia staged by Yannis Kokkos for the National Theatre (2001) and the title role in Euripides’ Μήδεια (Medea), directed by Antonis Antypas in Giorgos Chimonas’s translation, with music by Eleni Karaindrou. That Medea was a success at the ancient theatre of Epidaurus in 2011 and returned to the Odeon of Herodes Atticus in September. In 2015 she was Iphigenia in Euripides’ Ιφιγένεια στη χώρα των Ταύρων (Iphigenia among the Taurians) for the State Theatre of Northern Greece, directed by Thomas Moschopoulos.

Her modern repertoire is just as wide, from Shakespeare, Chekhov, Ibsen and Racine to Sarah Kane. She was Ophelia in a 1998 Hamlet and returned to the play as Gertrude in Yannis Houvardas’s production at the Onassis Stegi in 2015. In the 2007/08 season she performed Anna in Brecht and Weill’s The Seven Deadly Sins at the Greek National Opera, and said that the libretto in Greek was a great challenge. On screen she is known for Elias Giannakakis’s film Χαρά (Joy).

In interviews she calls acting “a very practical art”: just as a pianist learns how long to press each key, an actor must approach a poetic text through its sound, which is why translation matters so much.

Her work is recorded in the National Theatre of Greece’s digital archive, where programmes, press cuttings and photographs document productions such as the 2001 Oresteia and The Fourth Sister (2003), in which she played Katia. She has also passed her craft on to younger actors, from Patras and Embros to the Athens Conservatoire and the ancient drama workshop at Epidaurus.

Try this: find her Modern Greek sentence «Ο Ευριπίδης πείραξε τον μύθο για να τον φέρει πιο κοντά στην πραγματικότητα» (Euripides altered the myth to bring it closer to reality) in her 2015 interview with Το Βήμα. Report it in your own words, starting with Η Μουτούση είπε ότι… (Moutousi said that…). Then describe one stage action in Greek, for example Η Ιφιγένεια βγαίνει στη σκηνή… (Iphigenia comes onto the stage…).

• She played Ophelia in 1998 and Gertrude, Hamlet’s mother, in 2015, and said that the old role stays inside her “like genes”.
• She described Iphigenia as a “landscape of shades”: not clear night or day, but the passage to dawn.
• Accepting her 2013 film award, she said that recognition from people in the profession mattered more than that of the public.