Nearly half a century after her quiet death in a Paris apartment, Maria Callas continues to exert a hold on our imagination. Her interpretations of the canon are impossible to escape; her legend has — so far — proved impossible to eclipse.
Callas managed to achieve a cultural reach far surpassing what one might expect of an opera star in the 20th century. And now, with the release of “Maria,” a new biopic starring Angelina Jolie that imagines the final seven days of the diva’s life, the singer is poised to ensnare a new generation of adherents and admirers.
But her power extends well beyond her voice. From her au courant hairstyles to her haute couture fashions, from her flashing eyes to her grasping hands, these are the visual cues that, taken together, helped establish Callas as the cultural icon she remains today.
Her Hair
‘A Lot of Her Look’
“When those ladies left the house, they were done!” Adruitha Lee, the Oscar-winning hairstylist behind Angelina Jolie’s look in “Maria,” said recently by phone.
Ms. Lee was thinking less of great 20th-century opera stars than of her aunts in 1960s Alabama — characters who in key ways were an inspiration to her in creating the perfected public surfaces required of all women at one time, not just a diva assoluta. “Even if they went to the grocery store, they were done,” Ms. Lee said, referring to a particular aunt who maintained a collection of “cluster curl” hairpieces called switches, copies of which she used to recreate the architectonic coiffures Callas was famous for.
Studying Callas’s visual arc, as documented by Avedon, Beaton and, extensively, the paparazzi (a fresh coinage in the early 1960s), Ms. Lee also worked closely with Ms. Jolie and the film’s director, Pablo Larraín, to create Callas’s baroque theatrical and civilian hairdos. “I would like to be Maria, but there is the Callas that I have to live up to,” Callas once said.
Conjuring that Callas onscreen required 12 wigs, countless hairpieces and enough hair spray to poke a fresh hole in the ozone layer. “Callas’s hair was a lot of her look,” Ms. Lee explained. If her tonsorial style was bold, that was almost required by her powerfully imposing features.
Still: “I did not want the hair to take you away from the story,” she said. “The hair is not supposed to be a character.”
— Guy Trebay
Her Jewelry
Callas’s Other Form of Brilliance
How hard is it to picture Maria Callas’s bare earlobes? They were so often eclipsed by pepperoni-size clusters of rubies or dragged toward the ground by gargantuan pearls. That’s to say nothing of the diamonds — you could not miss the diamonds! — that glommed onto the singer’s neck and wrists like dazzling barnacles.
Callas’s glamorous public persona was amped up by the jewels she wore on- and offstage. “Jewelry certainly helped turn Maria into Callas,” Stefano Papi, a co-author of “20th-Century Jewelry & the Icons of Style,” told The New York Times last year. Many pieces were gifts from her husband, Giovanni Battista Meneghini, or her lover Aristotle Onassis, and others were lent to Callas by prestige jewelry houses for her performances, he said. (She did not stoop to the level of costume jewelry.)
Each bauble tended to be as dramatic as the singer herself, and served as a glittering reminder of the attention that her exquisite talent could command. They have become a part of her legacy: A collection of 11 pieces of her jewelry sold for $1.86 million at an auction in 2004, and a Cartier Panthère brooch that belonged to Callas appears in Pablo Larraín’s new biopic. The brooch, which the film’s star, Angelina Jolie, also wore to the Venice International Film Festival in August, features an emerald-eyed panther made of gold, its tail curled possessively around a milky gemstone.
— Callie Holtermann
Her Eyes
Even Frozen on Film, They Flashed With Life
In what may be the most famous image of Callas, the one Apple used in its “Think Different” campaign, the eyes are everything. She peers down at Cecil Beaton’s camera, lids heavy, finally able to coolly judge the viewer as she was forever being judged.
It is from photographs that we are intimately familiar with the visual aspect of a singer whose career was just early enough to leave us almost entirely without moving film of her in staged opera. But photographs were certainly able to capture her huge, dark, flashing eyes, always focused, always expressive of the shifting moods of her many roles.
Even silent, her gaze conveys the feelings at the core of some of opera’s most memorable characters. We see her imperious side-eye in Verdi’s “Don Carlo”; her plangent stare toward the heavens in Spontini’s “La Vestale”; a series of shots from Bellini’s “La Sonnambula” that find her eyes first demure and then despairingly huge and tear-filled as the drama advances. They’re wide with horror in Donizetti’s “Poliuto” and alert, then ferocious, then black with fear in Puccini’s “Tosca.” It doesn’t get more heartbreaking than Act II of Verdi’s “La Traviata,” when Callas’s eyes are cast downward with shame and hurt — all the vulnerability exposed in what was, just minutes before, a seen-it-all cynic.
— Zachary Woolfe
Her Hands
Clawing, Clutching, Indicting, Commanding
Her eyes are at the center of that Cecil Beaton photograph, but who could forget her hands, framing her face like a setting supporting the diamond in a ring? Callas’s hands, with their dramatic strength and long, articulate fingers, had a grandeur and also a specificity — an electricity — that helped her characters register all the way to the back rows of huge theaters.
As a pitiless Medea in Cherubini’s opera, she holds her arms outstretched, the pointer finger on each hand rigid: superhuman power, calmly personified. But then later in that work, as she deceives Creon into letting her remain in Corinth to be with her young sons, her hands are frozen in what seems to be a sincere plea.
Returning to the second act of “La Traviata,” as she writes a letter breaking with her lover, she rests her weeping head in one hand; it cups her face, as in the Beaton photograph, but now with a sense of infinite sadness. She clutches Alfredo’s father in an embrace, her pale hand a ghostly claw gripping his dark suit. Even in concert, her hands would wrap around each other, slipping to grip her forearms, as if they were both releasing and holding on to all of opera’s impossibly heightened emotions.
— Zachary Woolfe
Her Offstage Fashion
Costuming Her Most Important Role: Maria
Audrey Hepburn had Hubert de Givenchy. Catherine Deneuve had Yves Saint Laurent. And Maria Callas had Elvira Leonardi Bouyeure, known to her friends and family as Biki, the Milanese dressmaker whose cinch-waisted dresses and suits, gloves, and furs shaped the diva’s offstage embrace of glamour.
The two met in 1951, but Madame Biki, whose grandfather was Giacomo Puccini, is said to have refused to dress Callas until the singer lost weight; a few years later and some 60 pounds lighter, Callas returned and a collaboration that reportedly included 24 fur coats, 40 suits, 200 dresses, 150 pairs of shoes, at least 300 hats and innumerable gloves was born.
When Callas traveled, Madame Biki would send her off with each piece numbered and recorded so the singer could accessorize her outfits to perfection. Though Callas later also wore pieces by Dior, Saint Laurent and Chanel, it was Madame Biki who helped her show the world that being operatic was as much a state of wardrobe as stage.
— Vanessa Friedman
Her Makeup
The Cat Eye Is Just the Beginning
Pamela Goldammer is firm on the point that, from a makeup perspective, there is more to Maria Callas than winged eyeliner. You would be forgiven for thinking otherwise.
After all, it’s what the singer is wearing in her most indelible portrait, on several of her most famous album covers and at many of her 1950s and ’60s concert performances. But as Angelina Jolie’s makeup artist for “Maria,” Ms. Goldammer studied extensive photographs of Callas throughout the years, and the results were conclusive: The cat eye was just one small part of her cosmetic repertoire.
“It seemed she enjoyed to use makeup and wear makeup as much as her hair and her costume changed,” Ms. Goldammer said. As for a signature look, “I don’t think you could pinpoint just one, because there’s so many of her,” she added: Anna Bolena, Tosca, Norma, Medea.
When Callas did do winged eyeliner, it was often steep, though she played around quite a bit with shape and color.
“Sometimes it’s just the wing; sometimes the entire eye is outlined,” Ms. Goldammer said. “Sometimes she’s using — often, in fact — she’s using blues and greens.”
These weren’t variations for the sake of variation, Ms. Goldammer suggested, but conscious manipulations by a consummate creature of the stage.
“If I could say that there’s one thing I noticed,” Ms. Goldammer said, “I feel like she had a good eye for the effect of the makeup from the distance.”
— Louis Lucero II
Her Glasses
Style Over Squinting (Sometimes)
As fashionable as her eyewear often was, Maria Callas’s gigantic, tortoiseshell frames, which she wore primarily for function, were rarely spotted in photos.
As The New York Times reported in 1970, while the “blind as a bat” Callas was content with people seeing her wearing her brown, horn-rimmed eyeglasses while out and about, she would take them off to be photographed.
The same was true for the stage, where she opted not to wear glasses or contact lenses during performances. She was nearsighted and would memorize the stage design of the production and listened to the conductor to get by.
She often wore her hair pulled back at the crown, making the frames, which drew attention to her large, expressive eyes, a recognizable addition to her personal style.
It is still an accessory that her admirers continue to identify her with — and particularly with her professorial turn in the early 1970s, when she taught a series of master classes in opera at Juilliard. Prophetic in her dressing, the design of Callas’s wide-rimmed frames has maintained popularity among those looking to recreate a vintage 1960s or ’70s aesthetic, flocking to brands like Loewe and Celine for similar looks.
— Gina Cherelus
Her Nose
Jolie, Hold the Laide
No one looked like Maria Callas. In the age of plastic surgery, plenty of people aspire to look like one another. Callas’s face was a true original, and at the heart of her irreplicable beauty was that nose — long, tall, pointed and prominent. Utterly unavoidable. Her nose served as the centerpiece of an altogether arresting face.
Not a lot has been written about Callas’s nose, and what has hasn’t been flattering. (Big noses have something of a P.R. problem; I know, as the owner and operator of one.) In a review of a Callas biography published in this newspaper in 2001, the critic Terry Teachout mentioned the star’s nose in his opening paragraph: “A jolie laide with hard, bony features and a startlingly long nose, she contrived through sheer force of will to persuade audiences that she was a great beauty with an even greater voice. It was, of course, a con job.” Oof.
In The New Yorker, in 2011, Hilton Als wrote that “her nose was as long as an anteater’s.” Clever and perhaps accurate — but ouch.
In her too-short lifetime, Callas talked about many things, but rarely, if ever, her nose. It was a nose, and a beauty, that spoke — or sang — for itself.
— Anya Strzemien
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