Xenia Kalogeropoulou

Xenia Kalogeropoulou was born in Athens on 12 September 1936, the daughter of the painter Ira Oikonomidou and Adamantios Kalogeropoulos, and grew up in Palaio Psychiko. She learned to read in French before she went to school, and as a schoolgirl she was already writing plays and performing them with friends. She hoped to study at Karolos Koun's Art Theatre, but her family decided otherwise, and at eighteen she went to London to train at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA). She first appeared on stage in 1956 with a French company, in Molière's The Doctor in Spite of Himself.

Back in Greece, she made her film debut in 1958 with Η κυρά μας η μαμή (Our Lady the Midwife). Her role in Γάμος αλά ελληνικά (Marriage Greek Style, 1964) earned her the best actress award at the Thessaloniki Film Festival. In all she acted in more than fifty films and more than fifty stage plays; much later she appeared in Richard Linklater's Before Midnight (2013), filmed in Greece.

In 1972, under the dictatorship, she launched a children's stage with the actor Giannis Fertis, continuing it under her own name from 1975. In 1984 she bought a former cinema and opened the Porta Theatre. From 1983 to 2001 she chaired the Greek centre of ASSITEJ, the international association of theatre for children and young people. In 2022 both the University of Thessaly and the University of Athens made her an honorary doctor.

Kalogeropoulou began by translating and directing foreign plays for children, several of them from Berlin's Grips Theatre, which treated young spectators as thinking people able to question the adult world. Altogether she has translated around thirty plays, among them Pinocchio, Puss in Boots and Chekhov's The Seagull. Her own playwriting began with Οδυσσεβάχ (Odysseybach), completed in 1981 and staged at Porta in 1988 with music by Dionysis Savvopoulos. Its hero, half Odysseus and half Sinbad (Σεβάχ in Greek), travels towards Ιθαγδάτη, a destination whose name fuses Ithaca and Baghdad, meeting figures from the Odyssey, the Thousand and One Nights and lesser-known tales. The play has been translated into eight languages. She has said that a play for children needs one level they grasp at once and, behind it, secrets they can sense.

Ελίζα (Eliza, 1989), a very free adaptation of Thomas Heywood's The Fair Maid of the West, follows an ordinary girl who charters a ship with three friends and a parrot to find the man she loves. From 1992 she worked closely with the director Thomas Moschopoulos, co-writing plays such as Η Οικογένεια Νώε (Noah's Family, 1996). Το Σκλαβί (The Little Slave, 2000), drawn from a folk tale of Symi, received the Karolos Koun playwriting award in 2001. With Έλα, Έλα (Come, Come, 2009) she introduced theatre for babies to Greece, writing, co-directing and performing it herself.

The Porta Theatre is still active: Thomas Moschopoulos has been its artistic director since 2014, with Kalogeropoulou as president, and Ελίζα returned to the stage in 2025–26 in his new version. The Xenia Kalogeropoulou Theatre Workshop, founded in 2004 with the theatre educator Peggy Stefanidou, runs drama courses for children, teenagers and teachers. Her prose includes Γράμμα στον Κωστή (Letter to Kostis), a memoir published by Patakis. For a C2 task, take the title Οδυσσεβάχ and the destination Ιθαγδάτη, split each name into its two sources, and explain in Greek what the blend suggests about home and adventure. Then invent a blended place name for an imaginary journey and write a short exchange: Πού πηγαίνεις; — Πηγαίνω στην… (Where are you going? — I'm going to…). These sentences are our own practice material, not lines from the play.

• She learned to read in French before she started school.
• At her first children's show, Pinocchio, the audience was asked to close their eyes, and the actors forgot to tell them to open them again.
• She used an inheritance from her father to buy a cheap former cinema, which became the Porta Theatre.
• Odysseybach has been translated into eight languages.