Kakia Analyti

Kakia Analyti was born in Piraeus in 1934. She studied at the Drama School of the Athens Conservatory (Ωδείο Αθηνών), where the director Dimitris Rontiris taught. In 1955, while still a student, she made her stage debut with Dionysis Pagoulatos’s company as Katerina in Grigorios Xenopoulos’s Το φιόρο του Λεβάντε (The Flower of the Levant). ERT’s archive dates her first official appearance to 1958, in Βαθιές είναι οι ρίζες (Deep Are the Roots), with Manos Katrakis’s Greek Popular Theatre at the Kotopouli Theatre. She also worked with the companies of Adamantios Lemos and of Kostis Leivadeas’s Nea Skini. In Katerina Andreadi’s company she met the actor Kostas Rigopoulos, who became her husband and her lifelong stage partner. Their daughter, Zoi Rigopoulou, also became an actress.

In 1963 the couple founded the Rigopoulos–Analyti company, based at the Analyti Theatre near Pedion tou Areos in Athens. Until the mid-1990s it staged Greek and international plays, mostly comedies. From the late 1950s Analyti also played comic and dramatic supporting roles in Greek cinema, in films such as Λαός και Κολωνάκι (People and Kolonaki) and Μια του κλέφτη (One for the Thief) with Dimitris Horn. Her last appearance at her own theatre was in Σε φιλώ στη μούρη (I Kiss You on the Mug) in 1997–98. Rigopoulos died in 2001. Analyti died suddenly of a heart attack at her home in Palaio Faliro on 1 June 2002, aged 68.

The Analyti Theatre was above all a home for boulevard comedy: light, quick plays built on misunderstandings, marriages and mistaken identities. Its greatest success was Αγάπη μου Ουάουα (My Love Ouaoua), a Greek staging of François Campaux’s French comedy Chérie noire. According to ERT, it opened in the 1967–68 season at the Vergi Theatre and was performed until 1972. Other accounts give longer runs, so its exact length is uncertain, but all agree it was an exceptional success. A film version followed in January 1974. The company’s repertoire also included Έρωτας και πολιτική (Love and Politics), Ένα κρεβάτι για τρεις (A Bed for Three) and Γυάλινος κόσμος (The Glass Menagerie).

Television preserved part of this work. For ERT’s Θέατρο της Δευτέρας (Monday Theatre), Rigopoulos directed André Roussin’s comedy Ένα κρεβάτι για τρεις, recorded in 1977 and first broadcast on 4 September 1978. Analyti played Nina, Rigopoulos played Adolphe Tessier and Lefteris Vournas played Gérard de Val. In 1987 the couple appeared together on ERT’s Το καλλιτεχνικό καφενείο (The Artists’ Café), talking about their first steps in the theatre and about Αγάπη μου Ουάουα. Her final production drew a warm notice from the critic Vangelis Psyrrakis, who praised her restraint and inwardness.

Analyti’s career belongs to the history of Athens’s private theatre companies, where actor-managers ran their own stages and built loyal audiences season after season. ERT has returned to her work in archive tributes, and its Monday Theatre recordings keep her performances available. Watch a few minutes of Ένα κρεβάτι για τρεις in the ERT archive and follow who is speaking: write each line you catch with the character’s name, as in Η Νίνα λέει ότι… (Nina says that…). Then describe one movement you actually see in your own Greek sentence with a passive verb, for example Η πόρτα ανοίγεται (The door is opened). These are practice sentences of our own, not lines from the play.

• She made her stage debut in 1955 while still a drama student.
• The theatre she ran with her husband carried her own surname: Θέατρο Αναλυτή (Analyti Theatre).
• A theatre writer who saw her last production recalled that she performed with a broken arm in plaster.
• Αγάπη μου Ουάουα moved from her stage to the cinema in 1974.