Thursday, October 5, 2023



Cameras are set to roll in mid-October in Budapest on Pablo Larraín’s Maria Callas biopic “Maria” toplining Angelina Jolie in the title role with several new cast members now on board.

Italian star Valeria Golino, whose recent appearances include a lead in Netflix’s Elena Ferrante series “The Lying Life of Adults” and season 2 of Apple Original “The Morning Show,” is set to play the legendary opera singer’s older sister Yakinthi – known as Jackie – while revered Turkish screen and stage veteran Haluk Bilginer (“Winter Sleep”) has landed the role as Greek tycoon Aristotle Onassis.

Fremantle, which is producing “Maria,” also confirmed on Thursday that the film’s additional cast comprises Italian A-listers Alba Rohrwacher and Pierfrancesco Favino and Oscar-nominated Australian actor Kodi Smit-McPhee (“The Power of the Dog”), all in unspecified roles. “Maria” “tells the tumultuous, beautiful, and tragic story of the life of the world’s greatest opera singer, relived and re-imagined during her final days in 1970s Paris,” according to its logline. Steven Knight (“Spencer,” “Peaky Blinders,” “Eastern Promises”) wrote the script.

Callas was an American-born Greek soprano singer and one of the most famous opera singers of the 20th century. She was born in Manhattan and received her opera training in Greece when she was 13 and later moved to Italy for her career. Throughout the years, she dealt with near-sightedness that left her nearly blind and multiple scandals in her personal and professional life. She had an intense rivalry with Italian opera singer Renata Tebaldi, plus an affair with Aristotle Onassis (who later married Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, who coincidentally was the subject of Larraín’s film “Jackie).

“Maria” is produced by Juan de Dios Larraín for Fabula Pictures, Lorenzo Mieli for The Apartment Pictures, a Fremantle Company, and Jonas Dornbach for Germany’s Komplizen Film.






The film will have plenty of material to cover, as Callas was one of the most significant figures in the 20th century opera world. One of the most widely renowned soprano singers of all time, she was as well known for her diva-like temperament and her feud with Renata Trebaldi as she was for her exceptional vocal talents. The Greek-American singer also battled near-sightedness throughout her life and famously went through a transformational weight loss in the 1950s. Her accomplishments in opera were so plentiful that many of her fans referred to her as La Divina, or, “The Divine One.”


A film about the life of world-famous opera singer Maria Callas, starring Angelina Jolie, is being shot in Budapest at the Opera House.

The Hungarian State Opera House confirmed to Blikk that the filmmakers have indeed approached the institution “but in the absence of authorisation, we cannot give any information about the possible filming.” Angelina Jolie last visited Hungary in autumn 2010. She was filming the movie In the Land of Blood and Honey. 13 years ago, she rented a villa in the second district.

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