'I'm the creature of destiny. Destiny chose me. I'm outside myself and look at my life from the outside.'

LA CALLAS: The Return of Maria is a cinematic theatre portrait of Maria Callas, the extraordinary woman behind the voice, and the people who helped create, challenge, love, betray and ultimately define her.

From her difficult childhood and complicated relationship with her mother, through her transformation into the great opera diva, Callas's life unfolds through the relationships that marked her journey. The people closest to her become mirrors, catalysts and antagonists: those who demanded more from her, those who loved her, those who exploited her, those who competed for her attention, and those who could never quite see the woman beneath the diva.

This play began with two photographs of my father. In one, taken in 1959, he is standing beside Maria Callas. In the other, eight years later, he is interviewing her mother, Evangelia Kalogeropoulou. My father, Stamatis Filippoulis, was a young journalist then. He belonged to a generation of reporters for whom a story was something you pursued with a mix of grit, perseverence and also respect.

And Maria Callas was a story worth chasing.

In 1959, together with his colleague, the journalist Dimitris Liberopoulos, my father followed the movements of Callas and Aristotle Onassis, trying to secure the elusive interview, the photograph, the detail that would belong exclusively to them.

There was something almost theatrical about it: the waiting; the rumours; the sudden movement of a yacht; the reporters gathered at a distance; the knowledge that, somewhere beyond the horizon, was the woman whose voice had already conquered the world. My father interviewed her.

But what remained with him was not simply the excitement of having obtained an exclusive. It was the woman he encountered beyond the machinery of fame. She spoke of returning home after a performance that had been triumphantly received and finding herself in tears because she felt she had not served the composer's intentions as completely as she should have. To her, the stage was not merely a place to be admired. It was a place of responsibility.

She spoke, too, of celebrity as a boomerang — of the vulnerability that comes with being constantly seen. Those words remained with my father.

And, eventually, they came to me.

Years later, I would begin to understand that behind the mythology of Callas was a woman whose relationship with her art was almost ethical in its intensity. She demanded something from herself that the audience could never fully see.

The second photograph carries another kind of silence. In 1967, when my father interviewed Evangelia Kalogeropoulou, Callas's mother.

By then, the story of Maria and her mother had already acquired its own mythology. Mother and daughter had become characters in a drama that the world was eager to interpret.  My  father's memories of these encounters stayed with me differently.

Who makes us?

Who wounds us?

Who teaches us what love is, and what it is not?

These questions found their way into the play.

So did the memory of my father as a young reporter, pursuing Callas and Onassis through the Mediterranean world they inhabited. 

I don't want to mourn the woman I bring onto the stage. I want to to celebrate her both as LA CALLAS and as Maria.

Elizabeth Filippouli is a playwright with a passion for works that reimagine iconic historical and cultural figures through contemporary musical and dramatic storytelling.

Her plays include MARIA/La Callas -The Return, inspired by the incredible life of Maria Callas, ALEXANDROS the Musical and Alexander the Great: Between Dreams and Imagination, a play she adapted for the British Library in 2023, offering a fresh theatrical perspective on one of history's most enduring figures. In 2024, she served as Executive Producer of Fabulous Creatures at London's Arcola Theatre. ALEXANDROS is her debut musical, marking her first work as both book writer and lyricist.

As part of her philanthropic work Elizabeth is the Founder of Global Thinkers Forum, an international nonprofit dedicated to empowering young leaders and women through mentoring and education. She has served on the International Advisory Board of The King's Trust International.

Her book From Women to the World: Letters for a New Century  was published by Bloomsbury in the UK and the US in 2021.  A Harvard graduate  (ALM in Creative Writing 24) , she holds degrees from the University of Oxford's Saïd Business School, City University of London and Harvard Kennedy School '04.