Word: mercourial
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From her home in Paris, and virtually everywhere she goes, Actress Melina Mercouri has repeatedly denounced the military-backed regime in her native Greece-so noisily that the authorities took away her citizenship. When her father's body was to be brought from London to Athens last March, Mercouri was refused permission to attend the burial ceremony. But when her mother died last week, the authorities relented: Mercouri could return home for 13 hours, and only if she promised to make no public statements. "Let me smell the Athens sea air I love," said the actress. Then she went...
...park on the grounds that the fair was too disruptive to strollers. The Communist mayor of La Courneuve, in Paris' northern suburbs, quickly came to the rescue, offering 116 acres of parkland for the festival. More than 600,000 fairgoers, including such celebrities as Actress Melina Mercouri, braved intolerable traffic snarls to reach the site. Once there, bourgeois families crowded shoulder to shoulder with party sympathizers wearing Vietnamese coolie hats or sporting FREE ANGELA DAVIS buttons while walking along Ho Chi Minh and Karl Marx avenues...
Promise at Dawn, based on Romain Gary's dutiful autobiography, takes little Romain from his boyhood in Russia to his early manhood in Paris. Beside him at every step is Mama (Melina Mercouri), who could give Sophie Portnoy lessons in classic and popular momism. Denied recognition as an actress, she seeks vicarious glory through her child. Mama forces her son to take violin lessons that he might be another Heifetz, ballet lessons that he might be Nijinsky reincarnate, French lessons that he might be a future ambassador. The woman's compulsion is infinite; when her son enlists...
...hero, Assaf Dayan (Moshe's son) is called upon only to look virile, admittedly a difficult assignment given such smotherhood. As Mama, Melina Mercouri (Mrs. Dassin offscreen) has moments of solar intensity coupled with an absolute lack of vanity. When the script calls for her finally to be ill and old, she permits the makeup man to do his worst and appears pitiable indeed. In its own way, her vital, uninhibited performance is mere makeup, covering the scenario's merchandised nostalgia. There is, of course, the melancholy possibility that the Dassins wished to construct a burlesque. Sadder still...
...Melina Mercouri, the green-eyed Greek who never did it on Sunday, was in the U.S. to promote her new movie, Promise at Dawn, in which she plays the Russian mother of Novelist Romain Gary. It was a perfect opportunity to deliver some diverse opinions. On smoking...