Maria Callas died of a heart attack in her Paris apartment on 16 September 1977. She was 53. Forty-nine years later, she remains the most famous Greek American in opera — La Divina to audiences, “the Tigress” backstage.
Callas was born on 2 December 1923 in New York as Maria Anna Sofia Cecilia Kalogeropoulou. Her parents, George and Evangelia, were Greek immigrants; the family name became Callas around her christening. She left Manhattan in 1937 with her mother and sister after her parents separated, studied in occupied Athens with Elvira de Hidalgo, and sang to support the household.
Her Italian breakthrough was La Gioconda at the Arena di Verona on 2 August 1947. She married industrialist Giovanni Battista Meneghini in 1949. He managed her path to La Scala. In the mid-1950s, she lost more than 70 pounds (35 kg) and became the face and voice of postwar opera.
She opened the Metropolitan Opera season as Norma on 29 October 1956. Rudolf Bing canceled her Met contract in 1958 after a dispute over roles. A public fight with a rival at La Scala and a taste for solo curtain calls fed the diva legend. “Opera is a battlefield,” she said, “and it must be accepted.”
Her marriage ended as she began an affair with Aristotle Onassis. He married Jacqueline Kennedy in 1968. Callas’s last complete operas were in 1965. She died in Paris on this date in 1977.
