On the screen, she shared the poster with Richard Burton, Kirk Douglas, James Cagney and Jon Voigt in particular. Born on September 3, 1929 in a village in the Peloponnese, Chiliomodi, near Corinth, Irene Lelekou which will become known as dads, comes from a family of teachers. Endowed with a deep voice, a piercing gaze and a sculpted face as if taken from Greek Antiquity, Irene dads started acting at the age of 15 in local cultural events before entering the National Theater Academy in Athens. In 1948, she made her debut in the Greek film lost angels and four years later began his international career with ghost townthe first Greek film to be screened at the Cannes Film Festival.
The film adaptations of Antigone and Electra by Sophocles, in which she played the main role, reinforced her growing notoriety. In 1961, The Cannons of Navarone by J. Lee Thompson, in which she plays alongside Gregory Peck, David Niven and Anthony Quinn, was one of the most significant roles of her career. She will again partner Anthony Quinn in 1964 in the film Zorba the Greek by Michel Cacoyannis, an adaptation of the homonymous novel by Nikos Kazantzakis.
Her popularity, Irène Papas never really appreciated her: “Fame has brought me nothing“, she said in an interview with the Greek newspaper Eleftherotypia in 2003. “On the contrary, it destroyed my privacy. Because the person who was going to approach me, let’s say sexually, had already fallen in love with my image“. In contrast to his characters with the character of fires on the screen, Irene dads said of herself that she was “funky” and that she had turned to the theater to overcome her shyness.
In 2004, she revealed that she had a long secret love affair with Marlon Brando in the 1950s: “We had a love story. Let’s call it a long relationship“, she had told the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera. At 18, she married her theater teacher Alkis dads. They had no children and soon divorced, but she kept her husband’s name: “Before I couldn’t love or raise (a child). Now I wish I had one to carry on living“, she confided to Eleftherotypia. During the last years of his life, Irene dads lived near the Acropolis, where her niece cared for her as she suffered from Alzheimer’s disease.