Acclaimed Greek actress who embodied roles of heroism and tragic dignity

Irene Papas, who has died aged 96, claimed that she did not play passionate characters, but ‘‘I am those characters . . . That passion is my truth’’. With hypnotic eyes, jet-black hair and a sharp, electrifying intelligence, she was perhaps best remembered as Maria, a resistance fighter who dares to shoot an unarmed female traitor when her colleagues hesitate, in the World War II film The Guns of Navarone (1961), starring Gregory Peck and Anthony Quinn.

At one point during the filming, when her character is interrogated and tortured by an SS officer played by George Mikell, she asked for the scene to be reshot, insisting: ‘‘The torture must look real. I can take it.’’

She also played the young widow who is beaten and stoned by villagers after a night of passion in Zorba the Greek (1964), again with Quinn, and triumphed with performances in leading classical roles such as Antigone (1961), Electra (1962) and as Electra’s mother, Clytemnestra, in Iphigenia (1977).

Elsewhere she was Kirk Douglas’ wife in the 1968 mafia film The Brotherhood and the following year played Catherine of Aragon, the discarded wife of Richard Burton’s Henry VIII, in Anne of the Thousand Days.

If historical intrigue was not enough,

Papas also became embroiled in contemporary intrigue in her homeland. After the generals took over Greece in 1967, she emerged as a powerful critic of the junta, calling for a cultural boycott against ‘‘the fourth Reich’’. At a press conference in Rome she described the junta as ‘‘a ridiculous little bunch of half-educated colonels’’ and ‘‘no more than a bunch of blackmailers’’.

Such vehement opposition drove her into exile, in Italy and New York. Yet she was equally outspoken about American influence in her homeland. ‘‘We are nothing but an American colony,’’ she declared. ‘‘We import chewing gum and automobiles, books and records and culture. No wonder the Americans have done nothing against the junta.’’

She was able to return in 1974 after the fall of the regime, but her strident views remained. In her telling, society’s problems could be traced back to antiquity. ‘‘Plato made the first mistake,’’ she said. ‘‘He began to talk about the soul and morality, and he prevented the Epicureans from searching the nature of man. So Plato delayed the scientific and technical revolution for 3000 years.’’

She was born Irene Lelekou in 1926 in Chiliomodi, a village outside Corinth in Greece, one of four sisters. Their mother, Eleni, was a schoolteacher; their father, Stavros, taught classical drama in Corinth. He had ‘‘a consuming passion for ancient Greek culture and every day we were served Sophocles and Euripides for breakfast’’. Later

Do you know someone who deserves a Life Story? Email obituaries@dompost.co.nz she returned frequently to her childhood home.

Irene was 7 when the family moved to Athens, where at age 15 she joined the city’s Royal School of Dramatic Art and soon became something of a rebel. She disliked the school’s prescriptive and what she considered to be dated approach to acting, instead developing her own acting style. After graduating she immersed herself in the profession, appearing in countless plays.

In 1947 she married Alkis Papas, a poet, journalist and film director whose name she kept after their divorce four years later. By 1954 she was having a secret affair with Marlon Brando, the Godfather actor who at the time was in a relationship with the actress Rita Moreno. ‘‘He was the great passion of my life,’’ she said 50 years later, ‘‘the man I cared about the most and also the one I esteemed most, two things that generally are difficult to reconcile.’’

Her second marriage, in Las Vegas in 1957 to the actor Jose Kohn, lasted two days. She did not remarry, although enjoyed many romances, including with Nikos Verlekis, star of the 1977 BBC Two drama Who Pays the Ferryman?. ‘‘I like men a lot, full stop,’’ she once said. ‘‘I have never been afraid of love, or shielded myself from pain. Yet I can go for long periods, sometimes a year or two, without even touching a man.’’

Although Papas had made her debut on the Athens stage in 1948 as a ‘‘high-society girl’’, her roles soon changed dramatically to the point where her name was synonymous with Greek tragedy. ‘‘Drama is emotion,’’ she said in 1978. ‘‘All people have a tremendous depth of emotion and passion in them. Some people can’t express it. I’m the opposite. Being Greek, I was taught not to hide it.’’

Her first couple of Hollywood films, The Man from Cairo (1953) and Tribute to a Bad Man (1956) with James Cagney, bombed. She auditioned for a part opposite Burton in Alexander the Great (1956), ‘‘but I didn’t get it. I never do, when I audition. I don’t like the thought that I’m being judged.’’

More successfully she played Helene in Costa-gavras’s Oscar-nominated Z (1969), a thinly veiled account of the assassination of the Greek politician Gregoris Lambrakis in 1963, and was again reunited with Quinn in the Islamic epic drama The Message (1976), which was largely funded by Colonel Gaddafi of Libya and featured a score by Maurice Jarre.

She also signed up to play the opera singer Maria Callas in J Lee Thompson’s The Greek Tycoon (1978), about the shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis. When the producers dropped her, she successfully sued them for damages.

Singing formed another outlet and several of her recordings achieved classic status in Greece, some of them arranged for her by the Oscar-winning composer Vangelis. Papas featured on the album 666, by Vangelis’ rock group Aphrodite’s Child, causing a stir with one sequence that ended with her giving a quasi-orgasmic scream.

Frequently she threatened to abandon acting altogether ‘‘and do something that involves more of myself’’, as she told the critic Roger Ebert in 1969, adding: ‘‘I write poetry sometimes . . . usually . . . just for myself when I am in difficulty. They are like a tear.’’

Papas’ final film appearances included a brief role alongside Nicolas Cage and

Penelope Cruz in the screen adaptation of Louis de Bernieres’ Captain Corelli’s Mandolin (2001) and as a rich actress on a cruise ship with Catherine Deneuve and John Malkovich in A Talking Picture (2003).

Despite her magnificent depictions of some of history’s greatest women, she remained overlooked by the Academy Awards. ‘‘I never won an Oscar,’’ she shrugged with insouciance. ‘‘And the Oscars never won

Irene Papas.’’

‘‘I like men a lot, full stop. I have never been afraid of love, or shielded myself from pain.’’