Katia Dandoulaki

Katia Dandoulaki was born in Thessaloniki in 1948; a few sources give 1947. She grew up as an only child. In a 2024 television interview she recalled that her mother had loved the theatre but was never allowed to act. After school she won places both at the law school and at the drama school of the Art Theatre (Θέατρο Τέχνης), the company founded by Karolos Koun. She chose acting, although her parents objected and her father made her promise to stop if she did not succeed.

Her career began around 1970, and in 2021 the newspaper To Vima marked her fifty years in the theatre. From the start she combined stage and television, a choice she has defended in interviews. State television gave her major roles in the 1970s: Marioro in Ο Χριστός ξανασταυρώνεται (Christ Recrucified, 1975), Marmo in Οι Πανθέοι (The Pantheoi, 1977–1979) and Sappho in Η δασκάλα με τα χρυσά μάτια (The Teacher with the Golden Eyes, 1979). In the mid-1980s she worked on stage with the director Jules Dassin, in Turgenev’s A Month in the Country and in Extremities.

In 1991 she became Virna Drakou in Λάμψη, Nikos Foskolos’s daily serial on ANT1, which ran until 2005. For many years she has also led her own company, carrying the financial risks of production. In 2023 she returned to The Pantheoi in a new SKAI adaptation, this time as Chrysostomi, the unmarried sister of the family.

Much of Dandoulaki’s best-known television work brought modern Greek novels to a mass audience. Christ Recrucified, based on Nikos Kazantzakis’s novel about villagers chosen to perform the Passion, was broadcast in 1975 with a very large cast in which she played Marioro. The Pantheoi adapted Tasos Athanasiadis’s family saga, which won the Academy of Athens prose award in 1959; the story opens in 1939 in a family mansion in Kifisia. As Marmo, the young woman who marries into the Pantheos family and becomes a source of scandal, she found what she later called a milestone, a role that marked her career. In The Teacher with the Golden Eyes, from the novel by Stratis Myrivilis, she played Sappho, the widow of Vranas, a fellow soldier of the hero Leonis Drivas. Χατζημανουήλ (Chatzimanouil), directed by Giannis Smaragdis from the novel by Thrasos Kastanakis, gave her another literary role, Tasoula, in 1984.

Her stage work as the head of a company includes popular crime comedy, such as Διάλεξε τον θάνατό σου, αγάπη μου (Choose Your Death, My Love), a 2023 version of Robert Thomas’s Double Jeu at her own theatre. Running a company also means taking commercial risks: in a 2019 interview she said that one production, Το παιχνίδι των θεών (The Game of the Gods), had cost her 500,000 euros, yet she still valued it artistically. Her career shows two sides of an actor’s life in Greece: shaping a character and keeping a theatre open.

Dandoulaki belongs to the generation of actors who made modern Greek novels familiar to television viewers. Many of her 1970s and 1980s series are catalogued in the ERT online archive, where episode records list the cast and each actor’s role. Open the record for the first episode of Η δασκάλα με τα χρυσά μάτια (1979) and find her name and her character. Then write two original sentences in Greek. Report her words: Η ηθοποιός είπε ότι ο ρόλος ήταν ορόσημο (The actor said that the role was a milestone). Describe a stage action, using the portrait on this page from a 2023 curtain call: Η ηθοποιός σηκώνει τα χέρια και χαιρετά το κοινό (The actor raises her arms and greets the audience). These are practice sentences, not lines from any series or play.

• She passed the entrance exams for law but chose the Art Theatre drama school.
• She acted in both television versions of The Pantheoi: as Marmo in 1977 and as Chrysostomi in 2023.
• In a 1999 ERT programme she joked that she was Jules Dassin’s official translator, turning his Greek into everyday Greek.
• In 2021 she marked fifty years in the theatre.