Eleni Papadaki was born on November 4, 1908 in Athens from a wealthy family. Her father, Nikolaos Papadakis, was a senior employee of the Ionian Bank and her mother, Ekaterini Konstantinidis, was the daughter of university professor Stylianos Konstantinidis, originally from Constantinople. The Papadakis family also had a son, Michalis, two years younger than Eleni.
He received an excellent education and had a great passion for the theater from a young age. She graduated from the German School of Athens and attended philology courses at the University of Athens as an audience. She spoke four languages fluently (German, English, French, Italian) and perfected her ancient Greek to be able to read the tragedians from the original. She completed her education by studying vocal music and piano at the "Hellenic Conservatory" of Athens.
At the age of 17, she appeared on stage at the Spyros Melas Art Theater (June 25, 1925), performing the role of the Ancestor in Luigi Pirandello's play Six Persons Seeking an Author. This first appearance of hers was greeted with enthusiastic reviews. "The stage has acquired a great actor" Kostis Bastias wrote in the newspaper Dimokratia. In the same year, she also distinguished herself as the Heroine in Oscar Wilde's Salome and Rilke van Eyden in Lenormand's Time is a Dream.
With Katina Paxinou, at the beginning of their career
In 1926 she participated in the troupe Oi Neoi as a protagonist in plays by D'Annuccio (Gioconta), Grigorio Xenopoulos (The Emergence) and other authors. In the following years he collaborated with Kyveli, Marika Kotopoulis, Emilios Veakis, Nikos Dendramis, George Pappas, Periklis Gavrielidis and distinguished himself in particular as:
Margarita (Lady with the Camellias by Dumas)
Anna (Lothar's "Pretty Fairy")
Katya Maslova (Resurrection by Tolstoy)
Nora (Ibsen's A Doll's House)
Duchess ("Enemies" by Nicodemus)
Eleni Nikolaevna (Archibatsev's "Jealousy")
In 1931 she performed with her own troupe in Istanbul, where she was greatly honored and raved about. The Turkish writer and poet Halit Fakhri in his review said among others: "Then I saw Papadaki in front of me as a living symbol of a noble art. Although I do not know a word of Greek, nor had I read the work in the original, her voice, the movements, the mime and the attitudes of this artist with a fiery soul, spoke to me and came to me as words. It is particularly worthy of appreciation and praise that an artist so young portrays with such power the face of a mature woman, a mother."
In 1931 she made her only appearance in the cinema. She starred in Ioannis Loumos's silent film Stella Violanti, the soul of pain, which was based on the short story Stella Violanti by Grigorios Xenopoulos. The artistic result did not satisfy her and she decided to dedicate herself to the theater.
In 1932 she was hired by the reconstituted National Theatre, in which until the end of her short life she played leading roles, which left an era. Stand out as:
Ella Redheim (Ibsen's "John Gabriel Borkman", 1933)
Disdemona (Shakespeare's Othello, 1933)
Zelfa ("Judas" by Spyros Melas, 1934)
Queen (Schiller's Don Carlos, 1934)
Ersilia Drey ("To Dress the Naked" by Pirandello, 1935)
Bettina Clausen (Hauptmann's Before Sunset, 1936)
Angela Papastamou ("Temptation" by Xenopoulos, 1936)
Lady Windermere (Oscar Wilde's Fan, 1937)
Mandalenia (Moliere's "Pseudospudaiae", 1938)
Natalia of Orange (Kleist's Prince of Homburg, 1938)
Regan (Shakespeare's King Lear, 1938)
Lady Chiltern (Oscar Wilde's Ideal Husband, 1938)
Lady Tizzle (Sheridan's School of Foul Language, 1939)
Maria (Herman Barr's The Concerto, 1939)
Dorothea (Hauptmann's Dorothea Angerman, 1940)
Duchess of Marlborough (Scrib's A Glass of Water, 1940)
Porcia (Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, 1940)
Selimeni (Moliere's Misanthropos, 1943)
In his review of the performance of Pirandello's play Dressing the Poor, Achilleas Kyrou wrote: "The applause belonged especially to Miss Papadakis, who demonstrated the qualities of a truly superior actress." For the same role, Themistoklis Athanasiadis-Novas noted: "But the glory of the evening was Miss Papadaki. I do not say to her that she can be proud. We should be proud of her."
Eleni Papadaki as Hekavi
Her performances in ancient drama performances were also of a high level. Stand out as:
Clytemnestra (Sophocles' Electra, 1936)
Antigone (Sophocles' Antigone. 1940 and 1941)
Iphigenia (Euripides' "Iphigenia En Taurois", 1941)
Hekabi (Euripides' "Ekabi", 1943 and 1944).
On December 30, 1943, Angelos Sikelianos wrote in Elefthero Vima about Papadaki's Hecabi, which was also the swan song of her career: "The amazing performance of Hecabi stopped us in front of an event, which very few of us can respond to, not only among us, but also in the history of acting as a whole. I mean this fact: To see a great artist like Eleni Papadakis, to submit, to be completely disciplined in the Word and the Spirit of the work, with such religious humility in front of the poet, so that suddenly - no matter how great an artist she was in her earlier performances - she was revealed to us recreated at another highest level of her creativity Virtue". The actress Elsa Vergi later said that "Papadaki's Hekavi was the symbol of an entire race in the face of a mother."
During the Decembers, Eleni Papadakis was arrested at the house of her friend and colleague Dimitris Myrat in Patisia (December 21, 1944) by ELAS men, following the order of Captain Orestis, the 23-year-old leader of the OPLA of the area. She was accused of a pro-German attitude and of being "Ralli's girlfriend", i.e. of the occupying Prime Minister Ioannis Ralli. Rumors circulating in Athens wanted her to marry Ralli.
The reality was that the Ralli and Papadaki families had been connected by friendship since the pre-war years and Eleni Papadaki had interceded with Ralli for the release of resistance or Jewish wanted persons. Earlier, specifically in November 1944, Papadaki was expelled from the Greek Actors' Union (SEH), which was controlled by the KKE, for her pro-German attitude.
At midnight, the interrogation of Papadakis by Captain Orestis began and in the early morning hours of December 22, 1944, she was sentenced to death by an ELAS emergency. Immediately after, he was taken along with other future death victims to the ULEN refineries in Galatsi, where he was murdered with two bullets in the neck by OPLA executioner Vlassis Makaronas. Orestes' order was to execute him with an axe, but Makaronas probably felt sorry for her and preferred a more "painless" way.
Papadaki remained missing for a month. Her body was found on January 26, 1945, causing a shock to Athenian society. According to the press of the time, the funeral was "grandiose", and it took place on January 28 in Agios Georgios Karytsis, in the presence of a large number of people. Papadaki's tragic death brought an early end to a brilliant career and was mourned as a national loss.
Aggelos Sikelianos dedicated the verses to her, in the form of an epigram:
Remember Lord: For the time his slaying blade flashed
and all the god of Tragedy appeared.
Remember, Lord: for the time when suddenly, the nine sisters bent down to put the crown of the ages on her.
The epilogue to the murder of Eleni Papadakis was written with the apology of g.g. of the KKE, Nikos Zachariadis, and the execution of Orestis as an "Intelligence Service agent". Makaronas and his group were arrested by the authorities, sentenced to death and executed.
