Soprano Maria Callas‘ life was apparently destined to be in the shadow of Jackie. Many years before she and Jackie Kennedy were on opposite sides because of Aristotle Onassis, there was Jackie Callas, her older sister, and her mother’s favorite. Their relationship, mirroring their maternal relationship, was complex.

Yakinthi, registered as Jackie when her parents emigrated from Greece to the United States, was 5 years older than Maria, who was born in New York. Always thin, considered “prettier” and more popular, Jackie was everything Maria wasn’t when she wasn’t singing. Given the toxicity of the Kalogeropoulos family relationship, it has always been impossible for the two sisters to have a healthy relationship. In the film in production, Maria, by Pablo Larraín, Jackie Callas will be played by none other than the Italian Valeria Golino.

The film, starring Angelina Jolie, will mirror the director’s two previous biopics, Spencer and Jackie, about Maria’s rival, Jackie Kennedy Onassis, where it focuses on a few vital days in the lives of Diana Spencer and her ex-first lady. In Maria’s case, her last days isolated in her apartment in Paris remembering her past and her relationships with Onassis (Haluk Bilginer) and her husband, Meneghini (Alessandro Bressanello), almost always listening to her own recordings. Kodi Smit-McPhee will be a reporter who will talk to the diva.

“I answered yes because I love the style of [Pablo] Larraín, a director of great stature and without scruples. I really liked his Jackie”, revealed Valeria Golino a few days before starting. recording, in October 2023.

As a favorite, Jackie even dreamed of a singing career, but, without Maria’s talent, she took a backseat. The competition between the two becomes clear when the words she used to speak when she sees her dead sister’s body are: “She had everything in the end. I was the beautiful one, I was the sister who was getting married. Mary [her childhood nickname], stocky, fat-legged Mary, sang. Now, there I was, sixty years old, single and there was Mary, one of the most famous women in the world,” she wrote in her biography, published in the late 1980s.

It will be interesting to see this sister relationship that has not yet been explored in films about Maria Callas. The soprano died of a heart attack, twelve years after finishing his career at the Opera (even though he was still teaching and performing concerts for some time). Maria has always resented her family, as she felt exploited by them.

Writer Lyndsy Spence, who I’ll be talking to for my CLAUDIA column soon, had access to documents and letters that changed the narrative of Callas’ final years. In them, she found evidence that she suffered from a neuromuscular disorder that began to manifest itself in the 1950s, as well as that she was dependent on sedatives, all of which accelerated the pressure on a fragile and damaged heart. Always tragic, always fascinating.

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