The True Story of Angelina Jolie’s “Maria”: All About the Tumultuous Life of Opera Singer Maria Callas

Angelina Jolie is bringing legendary and controversial opera singer, Maria Callas, to life in Pablo Larraín’s biopic Maria — but how much of it is accurate?

Callas, known as “La Divina” (The Divine), was an American-born Greek soprano who rose to fame in the 1950s and is often credited with the bel canto revival. She is considered one of the most renowned and influential opera singers of the 20th century and one of the greatest divas of all time due to both her talent and her temperamental reputation.

The movie focuses on the final days of Callas' life as she retreats to Paris — where she lived alone besides her housekeepers — and reckons with the ups and downs of her journey and identity.

At the film’s August 2024 premiere at the Venice Film Festival, Jolie spoke about the “negative connotations” of the word “diva” and how her own perspective shifted after portraying Callas. “I think I’ve re-learned that word through Maria … and I have a new relationship to it,” she said.

Offstage, Callas was known for her tumultuous personal life. For nearly 10 years, she had a highly publicized affair with the Greek shipping magnate, Aristotle Onassis. Their love story experienced betrayal and heartbreak, though, when Onassis married Jackie Kennedy.

Related: Is Angelina Jolie Singing in Maria? How the Actress Transformed Into Opera Legend Maria Callas (and Her Shocking Reaction to Singing for the First Time!)

“I am not an angel and do not pretend to be,” Callas is quoted as saying in the 2017 documentary Maria By Callas, which includes never-before-seen footage of the star. “That is not one of my roles. But I am not a devil, either. I am a woman and a serious artist, and I would like so to be judged.”

Maria, which earned Jolie an eight-minute standing ovation at its premiere, is now streaming on Netflix.

So how much of Maria is true? Here’s what to know about the real events that inspired the biopic of the iconic opera singer.

Who was Maria Callas?

Maria Anna Cecilia Sophia Kalogeropoulos was born on Dec. 2, 1923, in New York to Greek immigrant parents who later shortened the family’s surname to the anglicized “Callas."

At the age of 13, her parents separated, and Callas moved to Athens with her mother and sister, Jackie. There, she began her musical education with vocal training at the Greek National Conservatory, per her bio on the Maria Callas Museum website. By the time she was 17, she had made her professional debut.

She continued performing on international stages throughout Greece, Italy, London and America to great acclaim. In 1956, she opened the New York Metropolitan Opera’s season with a leading role in Norma and was hailed as “queen of the world’s opera” by TIME.

Thanks to her dramatic vocal range and equally dramatic personal life, Callas was a household name. By the mid-1960s, though, her famous voice began to falter, and she withdrew from the operatic stage. Her final public performance came in 1974 in Sapporo, Japan, per the museum.

Was Maria Callas married?

In 1947, Callas met Giovanni Battista Meneghini (Alessandro Bressanello), a wealthy Italian industrialist, when she was 23 and he was 51. He soon became her manager, lover and, eventually, husband. The pair married in April 1949, and Meneghini continued to oversee her career.

According to Callas, his management became more controlling than collaborative, though. She began to feel suffocated, which was a large part of what led to their divorce in 1959, per a 1982 article in The New York Times. She later accused him of swindling her in letters published in Lyndsy Spence's 2021 biography Cast a Diva: The Hidden Life of Maria Callas, saying he put all of their assets in his name, effectively stealing half of everything she earned.

Publicly, Callas made no secret of her ill feelings toward her ex-husband. “He told lies and tried to take credit for everything in my success,” she told The New York Times in November 1970.

Ultimately, the pair separated after Callas began having an affair with Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis (Haluk Bilginer).

How long was Maria Callas and Aristotle Onassis' affair?

Callas first met Onassis in 1957 at a party hosted by socialite and gossip columnist Elsa Maxwell. Two years later, according to a 2000 The New York Times story, Onassis invited the opera singer and her husband to join him and several other guests on a Mediterranean cruise aboard his yacht.

Despite the fact that both Onassis and Callas were married at the time, they began an affair during that cruise. Just a few weeks later, Callas left Meneghini, and in 1960, Onassis and his wife divorced. Their affair, which lasted for nine years, was highly publicized.

“The world has condemned me for leaving my husband, but I didn't leave him - he left me because I would not let him take care of my business affairs anymore,” Callas said, per her obituary in the Washington Post. “I was kept in a cage so long that when I met Aristo and his friends, so full of life and glamor, I became a different woman."

Her biographer, Spence, wrote in The Times in 2023 that Callas desperately wanted to marry Onassis and had become pregnant multiple times throughout their romance but miscarried. When he married Kennedy in 1968, the subject of Larraín’s 2016 biopic, Jackie, Callas was reportedly left heartbroken.

Publicly, though, she maintained that their breakup was amicable. “[I have] no regrets,” she told Barbara Walters during a 1974 interview. “Otherwise, I would have married him.”

Callas never had a relationship with Kennedy or her husband, President John F. Kennedy, but the opera singer did attend the 1962 Madison Square Garden fundraiser where Marilyn Monroe famously sang "Happy Birthday" to the president.

Callas and Onassis continued to see each other despite the latter's marriage, and their love never died, Onassis’ then personal secretary, Kiki Feroudi Moutsatsos, told PEOPLE in December 2024. “Maria was a piece of his soul, of his body, of his brain,” she recalled. “That’s why they never believed that they could be separate.”

At the end of his life, Callas went to visit Onassis on his deathbed — a moment that was devastating for the opera diva, Onassis’ then personal secretary, Moutsatsos said.

“She knew because she had spoken to the doctor that there was no hope — that he was almost dead, finished and Maria had no hope that they would ever be together again," she said.

Onassis died on March 15, 1975, leaving Callas "desperate" and losing her will to live, the former secretary added.

“Maria was living in her own world," Moutsatsos said. "She didn’t want to eat, didn’t want to go out, she didn’t want to speak with friends. She lost her appetite to live.”

Why was Maria Callas estranged from her family?

Aside from the men in her life, Callas had a tumultuous relationship with her family, particularly her mother, Litsa.

Speaking to TIME, Callas reflected on her upbringing with sadness and anger. “My sister was slim and beautiful and friendly, and my mother always preferred her,” she said. “I was the ugly duckling, fat and clumsy and unpopular. It is a cruel thing to make a child feel ugly and unwanted.”

Following her parents' separation, Callas moved to Greece with her mother and sister. There Litsa, having discovered her younger daughters’ vocal talents, pushed her to perform to help provide for the family. “I’ll never forgive her for taking my childhood away,” Callas told TIME. “During all the years I should have been playing and growing up, I was singing or making money.”

Later, once Callas had successfully established her opera career, her mother began to sell stories about her to the press and blackmail her, per a 2021 story in The Guardian. Eventually, the two became estranged.

“I would never make up with my mother, and I have very good reasons,” she told The New York Times in 1970. “She did many wrong things to me, and blood is just not that strong a tie.”

What happened to Maria Callas’ voice?

By the 1960s, Callas’ voice began to show a significant decline, and she slowly started to withdraw from the stage. Her final operatic performance came in 1965 at Covent Garden in London. After that, Callas taught a masterclass at The Juilliard School and embarked on a world tour in 1973, singing in public for the last time in 1974, per the Maria Callas Museum website.

Callas’ opera career ended when she was only 41, but the reason for her voice loss is still the subject of some debate.

For one thing, in the 1950s, she underwent a dramatic physical transformation, shedding over 60 pounds, according to Barron's. Many have theorized that this drastic weight loss could have contributed to her vocal decline. Overuse may have also played a part.

But the biggest factor was her ailing health. She began experiencing a number of symptoms, Spence told History, including losing her balance and vision — but no doctor would diagnose her. “She was classed as crazy, dramatic, a hypochondriac,” the biographer said.

Ultimately, Callas was diagnosed with dermatomyositis in 1975, according to The Sydney Morning Herald, a rare inflammatory disease that causes muscle weakness. She was also struggling with addiction after Onassis introduced her to mandrax, which sedated her nervous system, per Spence.

How did Maria Callas die?

During her final years, Callas retreated from the public altogether, living in her Paris apartment with only her housekeeper, friend and butler, per the museum's site. There, she died on Sept. 16, 1977, at the age of 53, of a heart attack.

She was cremated, and her ashes were eventually scattered into the Aegean Sea, which was, according to the museum, her last wish.

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