Mirka Papakonstantinou

Mirka Papakonstantinou was born in 1947 in Pangrati, a central district of Athens, and still calls herself a true Athenian. As a young woman she worked mornings at an advertising agency while studying acting, on a scholarship, at Giorgos Theodosiadis’s Athens Drama School. After graduating she joined the State Theatre of Northern Greece in Thessaloniki, where she started in the chorus.

Back in Athens she found her way into revue and comedy. She has said that the director and actor Stamatis Fasoulis taught her stage technique in those early years. In the late 1970s she was among the actors of Εδώ Λιλιπούπολη (Here Lilliputopolis), the satirical children’s programme on the Third Programme of Greek radio, then directed by Manos Hadjidakis. In 1981 she played Stella in Frida Liappa’s first feature film, Οι δρόμοι της αγάπης είναι νυχτερινοί (The Ways of Love Are Nocturnal). The film won five awards at that year’s Thessaloniki Festival.

She has since appeared in more than fifty stage productions and in many television series and films. From 1986 to 1988 she taught acting at the school where she had trained, and since 1997 she has taught at the Ίασμος (Iasmos) drama school.

Papakonstantinou has said that she likes to stand at the extremes: she has played revue, drama, comedy and light comedy, sometimes in the same season. Television made her face familiar. In the ANT1 comedy Οι στάβλοι της Εριέτας Ζαΐμη (The Stables of Erieta Zaimi, 2002–2004), set in a women’s prison, she played Roxani Ntanou-Kouloumpi, and in Alpha’s family comedy Το σόι σου, first shown in 2014, she plays the mother. She has noted that the film Το κλάμα βγήκε απ’ τον Παράδεισο, by Michalis Reppas and Thanasis Papathanasiou, still draws viewers every time it is shown on television.

On stage she has often chosen risk. In 2004, at the National Theatre’s New Stage, she was the Narrator in Ντόγκβιλ (Dogville), a stage version of Lars von Trier’s screenplay: the voice that tells the story of the small town. With the director Nikos Karageorgos she performed Yannis Ritsos’s Ισμήνη (Ismene) and Alejandro Casona’s Με τη σιωπή, which he adapted. As Elisea, an unmarried woman who lives in her imagination while waiting for her fiancé to return from America, she played at the Veakis Theatre from 2006 to 2008 and won the Athinorama award for female performance. In 2017 she was the grandmother Sevasti in Fasoulis’s staging of Christos Chomenidis’s novel Νίκη (Niki), a role she approached, in her words, with unusual restraint.

Papakonstantinou belongs to a generation of Greek actors who moved freely between revue, art cinema and popular television, and she has passed that craft on to students for decades. In January 2021 her Casona production was streamed online, and that June she starred in 1821 – η επιθεώρηση (1821 – the Revue) for the Municipal Theatre of Piraeus. For learners, her Greek interviews are a rich resource. In a 2018 interview with To Vima she said: «Ο καλός ηθοποιός πρέπει να έχει αγωνία» (A good actor must feel anxiety). Rewrite it as narration: Η ηθοποιός υποστήριξε ότι ο καλός ηθοποιός πρέπει να έχει αγωνία. Then describe a stage action of your own in one Greek sentence, for example: Η αφηγήτρια προχωρά αργά στο προσκήνιο και κοιτάζει το κοινό (The narrator walks slowly downstage and looks at the audience). This model sentence is ours, not from any play.

• As a child she wanted to become a flight attendant with Olympic Airways.
• In the revue Τι Βουλή θα παραδώσεις, μωρή she played a little boy, Lelos, around the same time as Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? on stage.
• She has called acting her psychotherapy.
• In 2018 she said she had no plans to retire and felt like “a racehorse” despite her years.