Word: paxinou
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Hall of Fame (Sun. 5 p.m., NBC). Katina Paxinou in Socrates' Wife...
Just a week after Paris' reigning theatrical couple had scored on Broadway (TIME, Nov. 24), it was Athens' turn. Heading the National Theater of Greece, Katina Paxinou and Alexis Minotis arrived for a two-week run, enacting (in modern Greek) the title roles of Sophocles' Electro, and Oedipus...
...Actress Paxinou-already known to Broadway for several performances in English-made an impressive though hardly an inspired Electra. Impressive, too, was the Orestes of Thanos Cotsopoulos, the Clytemnestra of A. Raftopoulou. But what is usually the stumbling block of modern productions of Greek drama-the management of the chorus-was this time the special glory. There were "a few too-mannered touches; but its grave movement, its now murmurous, now resonant chanting, its sudden, swift, intensely dramatic confrontation of the audience, gave it a kind of orchestral grandeur and swell...
Exceptional acting in the main roles overcomes the picture's constant danger of falling into absurdity. Katina Paxinou plays Ezra Mannon's voluptuous, murderous wife with such a convincing mixture of malice and weakness that one forgets completely that the character is itself unrealistic and even ludicrous. Her murder of Ezra is revenged by her two children, the weak Orin, and the strong Lavina (the Electra of Aeschylus). After killing their mother's lover and making her commit suicide, they are obsessed by their own guilt, and Orin, who is played superbly by Michael Redgrave, commits suicide himself, while Lavinia...
...Greta Garbo, 42, turned down the Paxinou role because she could not bring herself to play the mother of Rosalind Russell...