Nana Mouskouri
Ioanna "Nana" Mouskouri is a Greek singer and politician. Over the span of her career, she has released an estimated 450 albums in at least thirteen languages, including Greek, French, English, German, Dutch, Portuguese, Italian, Japanese, Spanish, Hebrew, Welsh, Mandarin Chinese and Corsican.
Mouskouri became well known throughout Europe for the song "The White Rose of Athens", recorded first in German as "Weiße Rosen aus Athen" as an adaptation of her Greek song "Σαν σφυρίξεις τρείς φορές". It became her first record to sell over one million copies.
Later, in 1963, she represented Luxembourg at the Eurovision Song Contest with the song "À force de prier", finishing eighth. Her friendship with the composer Michel Legrand led to the recording by Mouskouri of the theme song of the Oscar-nominated film The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. From 1968 to 1976, she hosted her own TV show produced by BBC, Presenting Nana Mouskouri. Her popularity as a multilingual television personality and distinctive image, owing to the then unusual signature black-rimmed glasses, turned Mouskouri into an international star.
"Je chante avec toi Liberté", recorded in 1981, is perhaps her biggest hit, performed in at least five languages – French, English as "Song for Liberty", German as "Lied der Freiheit", Spanish as "Libertad" and Portuguese as "Liberdade". "Only Love", a song recorded in 1984 as the theme song of TV series Mistral's Daughter, gained worldwide popularity along with its other versions in French, Italian, Spanish, and German. It became her only UK hit single when it reached number two in February 1986.
Mouskouri became a spokesperson for UNICEF in 1993. She was elected to the European Parliament as a Greek deputy from 1994 to 1999.
In 2006, she was a special guest on Eurovision Song Contest 2006's final, presented as the best selling artist of all time.
In 2015, she was awarded the Echo Music Prize for Outstanding Achievement by the German music association Deutsche Phono-Akademie.
Early years
Nana Mouskouri was born on 13 October 1934 in Chania, Crete, where her father, Constantinos, worked as a film projectionist in a local cinema; her mother, Aliki, worked in the same cinema as an usher. When Mouskouri was three, her family moved to Athens.Mouskouri's family sent her and her older sister Eugenía to the Athens Conservatoire. Although Mouskouri had displayed exceptional musical talent from age six, Jenny initially appeared to be the more gifted sibling. Financially unable to support both girls' studies, the parents asked their tutor which one should continue. The tutor conceded that Jenny had the better voice, but Nana was the one with the true inner need to sing. Mouskouri has said that a medical examination revealed she has only one functioning vocal cord and this could well account for her remarkable singing voice, as opposed to her breathy, raspy speaking voice.
Mouskouri's early childhood was marked by the German Nazi occupation of Greece. Her father became part of the anti-Nazi resistance movement in Athens. Mouskouri began singing lessons at age 12. As a child, she listened to radio broadcasts of singers including Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Judy Garland, Charles Trenet, Billie Holiday, and Édith Piaf.
In 1950, she was accepted at the Conservatoire. She studied classical music with an emphasis on singing opera. After eight years at the Conservatoire, Mouskouri was encouraged by her friends to experiment with jazz music. She began singing with her friends' jazz group at night. However, when Mouskouri's Conservatory professor found out about Mouskouri's involvement with a genre of music that was not in keeping with her classical studies, he prevented her from sitting for her end-of-year exams.
During an episode of Joanna Lumley's Greek Odyssey, shown on the UK ITV channel in the autumn of 2011, Mouskouri told the actress Joanna Lumley how she had been scheduled to sing at the amphitheatre at Epidauros with other students of the Conservatoire, when upon arrival at the amphitheatre word came through from the Conservatoire in Athens that she had just been barred from participating in the performance there owing to her involvement in light music. Mouskouri subsequently left the Conservatoire and began performing at the Tzaki club in Athens.
She began singing jazz in nightclubs with a bias towards Ella Fitzgerald's repertoire. In 1957, she recorded her first song, "Fascination", in both Greek and English for Odeon/EMI Greece. By 1958 while still performing at the Tzaki, she met Greek composer Manos Hadjidakis. Hadjidakis was impressed by Nana's voice and offered to write songs for her. In 1959 Mouskouri performed Hadjidakis' "Κάπου υπάρχει η αγάπη μου" at the inaugural Greek Song Festival. The song won first prize, and Mouskouri began to be noticed.
At the 1960 Greek Song Festival, she performed two more Hadjidakis compositions, "Τιμωρία" and "Κυπαρισσάκι". Both these songs tied for first prize. Mouskouri performed Kostas Yannidis' composition, "Ξύπνα αγάπη μου", at the Mediterranean Song Festival, held in Barcelona that year. The song won first prize, and she went on to sign a recording contract with Paris-based Philips-Fontana.
In 1961, Mouskouri performed the soundtrack of a German documentary about Greece. This resulted in the German-language single "Weiße Rosen aus Athen". The song was originally adapted by Hadjidakis from a folk melody. It became a success, selling over a million copies in Germany. The song was later translated into several languages and it went on to become one of Mouskouri's signature tunes.
Family life
Mouskouri has been married twice: first at age 25, to Yorgos Petsilas, a guitarist in her backing band They had two children ; the couple divorced in 1973. Shortly afterward, she began a relationship with her record producer André Chapelle; however, they did not marry then because she "didn't want to bring another man into the family" and divorce was against her conservative upbringing. They eventually married on January 13, 2003, and live primarily in Switzerland.Life outside Greece
In 1960, Mouskouri moved to Paris. She performed Luxembourg's entry in the Eurovision Song Contest 1963, "À force de prier". Although the song achieved only eighth place in the contest, in a field of sixteen, it achieved commercial success, and helped win her the prestigious Grand Prix du Disque in France. Mouskouri soon attracted the attention of French composer Michel Legrand, who composed two songs which became major French hits for her: "Les Parapluies de Cherbourg" and an arrangement of Katherine K. Davis's "Carol of the Drum", "L'Enfant au Tambour".In 1962, she met Quincy Jones, who persuaded her to travel to New York City to record an album of American jazz titled The Girl from Greece Sings. Following that she scored another hit in the United Kingdom with the song "My Colouring Book". In 1965, she recorded her second English-language album to be released in the United States, entitled Nana Sings. American singer Harry Belafonte heard and liked the album. Belafonte brought Mouskouri on tour with him through 1966. That year, they collaborated on an album entitled An Evening With Belafonte/Mouskouri released by RCA Victor. On the album's cover photo, Mouskouri is noticeably not wearing her signature black-rimmed glasses; during the tour, Belafonte suggested that Mouskouri remove her glasses while on stage. She was so unhappy with the request that she wanted to quit the show after only a few days. Finally, Belafonte relented and respected her wish to perform while wearing her glasses.
On September 15, 1965, Mouskouri appeared for the first time on American television with Harry Belafonte on the Danny Kaye Show. While on the show Mouskouri performed "Telalima" followed by "Σήκω χόρεψε κουκλί μου" accompanied by Harry Belafonte and Danny Kaye.
Mouskouri's 1967 French album Le jour où la colombe raised her to super-stardom in France. This album featured many of her French songs, "Au cœur de septembre", "Adieu Angélina", "Robe bleue, robe blanche" and the French pop classic "Le Temps des cerises". Mouskouri made her first appearance at Paris' legendary Olympia concert theatre the same year, singing French pop, Greek folk, and Hadjidakis numbers.
BBC-TV series
These successes across Europe and elsewhere impressed Yvonne Littlewood, the BBC producer who had first met Mouskouri at the 1963 Eurovision Song Contest in London. Following several successful guest appearances on British TV after her Eurovision performance, the BBC invited Mouskouri and her backing group, The Athenians, to start hosting a TV series called Presenting Nana Mouskouri from 1968 onwards. A typical episode of her series contained contemporary British, American and French pop and folk music, popular classical pieces, and the Greek songs which had originally made her famous. The shows also featured European and world music stars of the time as guests, making it one of the first BBC TV series to do so regularly. Despite the fact that stars from mainland Europe singing in languages other than English have tended to find it difficult to break into the British market, the series proved very popular with viewers of the new BBC-2 channel, and it ran until 1976. As well as performing songs known to British viewers, Mouskouri welcomed the television audience, chatted to her guest stars and gave spoken introductions to her French and Greek songs in fluent English. These introductions, along with a modest stage presence and her bespectacled appearance, made her a very distinctive star, as Yvonne Littlewood later explained:Mouskouri's international appeal encouraged the BBC to sell her programmes to television stations across the world, a fact which she acknowledged in a BBC interview in 2014:
Mouskouri also hosted her own shows for French and West German broadcasters during this period. At a time when TV programmes could attract huge audiences, her popularity as a multilingual television personality turned her into a truly international star.
Although music series such as hers started to become less common on British TV as the 1970s wore on, the BBC continued to engage Mouskouri regularly for one-off television specials and guest appearances on other programmes until the mid-1980s, by which time she had been a regular contributor to British TV for more than 20 years.