Elli Lambeti

She was born Elli Loukou on 13 April 1926 in Vilia, a mountain village in western Attica, and grew up in Athens. In 1941, at fifteen, she failed the entrance exams of the National Theatre's drama school, but with the help of her uncle, the actor Stamatis Loukos, she was admitted to the new drama school of the great actress Marika Kotopouli. She took the stage name Lambeti, suggested by her uncle, and soon had leading roles in the commercial theatres of Athens.

In 1952 she formed a theatre company with Giorgos Pappas and the actor Dimitris Horn, her partner on stage and, from 1953 to 1959, in life, and together they became the most admired couple of the Athenian stage, playing modern European and American drama as well as Greek plays. At the same time the cinema discovered her. Michael Kakogiannis cast her in his first film, Κυριακάτικο ξύπνημα (Windfall in Athens, 1954), and then in Το κορίτσι με τα μαύρα (A Girl in Black, 1956) and Το τελευταίο ψέμα (A Matter of Dignity, 1958). In the 1960s and 1970s she worked mostly in the theatre and appeared less often on screen. She fell ill with cancer and died in New York on 3 September 1983, aged fifty-seven.

Lambeti's art was restraint. Greek stage acting of the time was loud and grand; she spoke softly, moved little and let the camera find her face. Critics compared her to the great actresses of European cinema, and for a whole generation she was simply «η Λαμπέτη».

Κυριακάτικο ξύπνημα (Windfall in Athens, 1954) is a light comedy about a lost lottery ticket that wins, and the lives it turns upside down. Η κάλπικη λίρα (The Counterfeit Coin, 1955), by Giorgos Tzavellas, a film in several episodes that follow a fake gold sovereign through Athens, gave her and Horn one of its stories. Το κορίτσι με τα μαύρα (A Girl in Black, 1956), shot on the island of Hydra, is her masterpiece: she plays Marina, a shy young woman in mourning, mocked by the gossip of a small island, who falls in love with a visitor from Athens. The film was in competition at the 1956 Cannes festival and made both Lambeti and Kakogiannis known abroad. In Το τελευταίο ψέμα (A Matter of Dignity, 1958) she plays the daughter of a bourgeois Athenian family that has lost its money but keeps up appearances, and is pushed towards a rich marriage. In all three films she gives a face to the Greek woman of the 1950s, caught between old rules and new hopes.

Lambeti is still the model of the Greek film actress. Her three films with Kakogiannis are restored classics, shown on Greek television and at cinema retrospectives, and A Girl in Black is the one to start with: the white houses and harbour of Hydra in black and white, and a love story that a learner can follow with subtitles. Drama schools in Athens still talk about her natural style, and theatre people use her name as shorthand for an actress of rare sensitivity. If you go to Hydra, walk up from the harbour through the lanes where the film was shot.

• Lambeti was a stage name; she was born Elli Loukou.
• All three of her best-known films were directed by Michael Kakogiannis, years before his Zorba the Greek.
• A Girl in Black was filmed on Hydra, when the island was still a quiet place, before tourism.
• For years she and Dimitris Horn led their own theatre company in Athens.