Maria Nafpliotou

Maria Nafpliotou (also spelled Naypliotou) lives and works in Athens. As a child, she has said, her mother thought her posture was poor and took her to a ballet school. There she watched older girls preparing for professional ballet and decided at once to become a dancer. She graduated from the professional dance school of Rallou Manou, and in a 2024 interview she recalled that she first went on stage as a dancer at 15.

She built a career as a professional dancer, but in her mid-twenties she gave it up completely: she later said she never went back into a ballet studio. Her reason was practical. Dance leaves you early, she explained, while theatre can stay with an actor into old age. She studied at the drama school of the Modern Theatre of Athens. In 1999 she made her debut at the National Theatre as Catherine Holly in Tennessee Williams's Ξαφνικά πέρσι το καλοκαίρι (Suddenly Last Summer); she credits the director Korais Damatis and the actor Nikos Kourkoulos with giving a role to “an unknown girl”. That July she played Antigone in Euripides' Φοίνισσες (The Phoenician Women) for the State Theatre of Northern Greece, directed by Nikos Chourmouziadis.

Around the same time the Mega television series Η αίθουσα του θρόνου (The Throne Room) made her known to a wide audience. On 24 March 2008 she lit the flame for the Beijing Olympic Games at ancient Olympia.

Much of her stage work has been in classical and ancient drama. At the National Theatre she played Doña Elvira in Molière's Δον Ζουάν (Don Juan, 2000), the goddess Athena in Aeschylus' Ορέστεια (Oresteia, 2001), Vera in Janusz Głowacki's Η τέταρτη αδελφή (The Fourth Sister, 2003), Aphrodite in Euripides' Ιππόλυτος (Hippolytus, 2004) and Regan in Shakespeare's Βασιλιάς Ληρ (King Lear, 2005). With the State Theatre of Northern Greece she played the title role in Euripides' Ιφιγένεια η εν Ταύροις (Iphigenia in Tauris) at the ancient theatre of Philippi in 2006, and she appeared in Τρωάδες (The Trojan Women) in 2009.

Later she led major productions in Athens: Tolstoy's Άννα Καρένινα (Anna Karenina) at the National Theatre in 2016, directed by Petros Zoulias; Terrence McNally's Master Class, in which she played Maria Callas for several seasons from the late 2010s; Eduardo De Filippo's Φιλουμένα Μαρτουράνο (Filumena Marturano) in 2023; and in 2024 Ακρωτήρι (literally “Cape”), a play about dementia in which she plays a woman who is losing her memory, directed by Odysseas Papaspiliopoulos. On screen she played Popi in Yannis Economides' film Η ψυχή στο στόμα (Soul Kicking, 2006) and also appeared in Η χορωδία του Χαρίτωνα (Chariton's Choir) and Πεθαίνοντας στην Αθήνα (Dying in Athens). Her path from dance to speech gives her acting a strong physical presence.

Nafpliotou still works mainly on the Athens stage; in 2024 she said the stage had been her home for almost thirty years. She has also returned to television, for example as a widow in the ERT1 series Παραλία (Beach). The flame lighting she performed in 2008 is part of a ceremony that Greece holds at Olympia before every Olympic Games. For a Greek task, read her own sentence in “A line to remember” below and find the two job words: χορεύτρια (dancer) and ηθοποιός (actor). Then describe a short movement sequence aloud, the way a dancer marks it: Σηκώνω το χέρι (I raise my hand). Γυρίζω δεξιά (I turn right). Περπατάω μπροστά (I walk forward). Finally add one line that an actor speaks: Μιλάω στο κοινό (I speak to the audience).

• Her first ballet lessons came about because her mother thought she needed better posture.
• She calls Doña Elvira in Don Juan (2000) her first failure on stage, and says it taught her that an actor needs technique, not only feeling.
• She has played two goddesses at the National Theatre: Athena in the Oresteia and Aphrodite in Hippolytus.
• Her films brought her a best supporting actress award at the Thessaloniki Film Festival for Η ψυχή στο στόμα and a best actress award at a festival in Egypt for Η χορωδία του Χαρίτωνα (sources name Cairo or Alexandria).