Nana Mouskouri

Early years

Nana Mouskouri's family lived in Chania, Crete, where her father, Constantine, worked as a film projectionist in a local cinema; her mother, Alice, worked in the same cinema as an usherette. When Mouskouri was three, her family moved to Athens.

Mouskouri's family sent her and her older sister Eugenía (Jenny) 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 only has one functioning vocal cord and this could well account for her remarkable singing voice (in her younger years ranging from a husky, dark alto, which she later dropped, to a ringing coloratura mezzo), as opposed to her breathy, raspy speaking voice.

Mouskouri's 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, 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 Nana 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 due to her involvement in light music. Mouskouri subsequently left the Conservatoire and began performing at the Zaki club in Athens.

She began singing jazz in nightclubs with a bias towards Ella Fitzgerald 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 Zaki, 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' Kapou Iparchi I Agapi Mou (co-written with poet Nikos Gatsos) 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, Timōría ("Punishment") and Kyparissáki ("Little cypress"). Both these songs tied for first prize. Mouskouri performed Kostas Yannidis' composition, Xypna Agapi Mou ("Wake up, my love"), 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 ("White Roses from Athens"). 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: firstly at 25, to Yorgos (George) Petsilas, a guitarist in her backing band (the trio "The Athenians") and the first man she had kissed. They had two children (Nicolas Petsilas in 1968 and Hélène (Lénou) Petsilas (singer) in 1970) but divorced when Mouskouri was 39. Not long after that, she met her second husband, André Chapelle, then her sound technician, but they did not marry then because she "didn't want to bring another father into the family" and divorce was against her conservative upbringing. They eventually married on 13 January 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 that year, "À force de prier". Although the song achieved only eighth place in the contest, 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" (1964) and an arrangement of Katherine K. Davis's "Carol of the Drum", "L'Enfant au Tambour" (1965).

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 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. They teamed for a duo album entitled An Evening With Belafonte/Mouskouri. During this tour, Belafonte suggested that Mouskouri remove her signature black-rimmed glasses when on stage. She was so unhappy with the request that she wanted to quit the show after only two days. Finally, Belafonte relented and respected her wish to perform while wearing 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 "Opa Ni Na Nai" 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.

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. After shooting a folk music show with her in 1967, the BBC then invited Mouskouri and her backing group, the Athenians, to start hosting a TV series called Presenting... Nana Mouskouri from 1968 onwards. Each episode of the series typically contained songs from her developing repertoire of Greek folk music, French chansons, classical pieces and contemporary pop, and the shows often featured 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 Two channel, and it ran for eight years. As well as performing British and American pop and folk songs as part of her shows, Mouskouri also 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:

“I suppose it was unusual to see a singer wearing glasses. She didn’t look like everyone else. She didn’t have blonde hair, and she was very distinctive in her appearance. [...] You know, we should remember that, in those days, we didn’t have all the holiday programmes, so Greek music and anything Greek wasn’t as well known to the average public as it is now. [...] She would give the gist [in English] of the subject of the song before she sang it, and that was really quite unique and quite charming.”

In 1969, Mouskouri released a full-length British LP, Over and over, which reached number 10 and spent almost two years in the UK album charts. This was the first of a series of English-language albums which, boosted by her TV appearances, sold extremely well in the UK and Ireland, as well as in other European countries, during the early 1970s, including The exquisite Nana Mouskouri (1969), Turn on the sun (1970), A place in my heart (1971) and Presenting... Nana Mouskouri (1973), while concerts from two of her British tours were also recorded and released as LPs: British Concert (1972) and Live at the Albert Hall (1974).

Mouskouri's international appeal encouraged the BBC to sell her programmes to television stations across the world, and she 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 were becoming less common on British TV as the 1970s wore on, the BBC continued to engage her regularly for one-off television specials and guest appearances on other programmes until the mid-1980s, by which time she had been a frequent face on British TV for more than 20 years. Meanwhile, during the 1970s and 1980s, she expanded her concert tour to include her new fans, not only in the United Kingdom, but also in Ireland, New Zealand, Japan and Australia, where she met and befriended Frank Hardy, who followed her to the south of France in 1976.

Always a prolific recording artist, the 1970s saw Mouskouri record several LPs in German, including the hit albums, Sieben schwarze Rosen (1975) and Lieder, die die Liebe schreibt (1978). In France, she continued a series of top-selling records, such as Comme un soleil (1971), Une voix qui vient du cœur (1972), Vieilles chansons de France (1973), and Quand tu chantes (1976). Meanwhile, Passport, a compilation including her most popular songs in English, reached number 3 in the UK album charts in 1976 and won for her a gold disc.

As her fame began spreading outside her fanbase in Europe, the USA and the Commonwealth, Mouskouri was asked to record songs for the Japanese market. Meanwhile, in 1976, a renowned Taiwanese author, Echo, heard her music and introduced it to one of her female radio DJ friends. Mouskouri's records then become popular in Taiwan, especially among high school and college students, with one of her British albums, Nana's book of songs (1974) selling particularly well.

Middle years

In 1979, Mouskouri released another English-language album named Roses and Sunshine. This album consisted largely of folk and country material, and included work from sources including Neil Young, Dolly Parton, Bob Dylan and John Denver. It was well received in Canada, and one of the album's tracks, "Even Now" (not the same song as the 1978 Barry Manilow hit), became a staple on beautiful music radio stations in the United States. She scored a worldwide hit in 1981 with "Je chante avec toi Liberté", which was translated into several languages after its success in France. The momentum from this album also helped boost her following German album, Meine Lieder sind mein Leben. In 1984, Mouskouri returned to Greece for her first live performance in her homeland since 1962.

In 1985, Mouskouri recorded Only Love, the theme song to the British TV series Mistral's Daughter – based upon the novel by Judith Krantz – which reached number 2 in the UK charts. The song was also a hit in its other versions: L'Amour en Héritage (French), Come un'eredità (Italian), La dicha del amor (Spanish), and Aber die Liebe bleibt (German). The German version was also recorded with an alternate set of lyrics under the title Der wilde Wein but was withdrawn in favour of Aber die Liebe bleibt.

That same year, Mouskouri made a play for the Spanish-language market with the hit single Con Toda el Alma. The song was a major success in Spain, Argentina and Chile.

She released five albums in different languages in 1987, and the following year returned to her classical conservatory roots with the double LP The Classical Nana (a.k.a. Nana Classique), which featured adaptations of classical songs and excerpts from opera. By the end of 1987, she had performed a series of concerts in Asia, including South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong, Malaysia and Thailand.

Later years

Mouskouri's 1991 English album, Only Love: The Best of Nana Mouskouri, became her best-selling release in the United States. She spent much of the 1990s touring the globe. Among her early 1990s albums were spiritual music, Gospel (1990), the Spanish-language Nuestras Canciones, the multilingual, Mediterranean-themed Côté Sud, Côté Coeur (1992), Dix Mille Ans Encore, Falling in Love Again: Great Songs From the Movies. Falling in Love featured two duets with Harry Belafonte.

In 1993, Mouskouri recorded the album Hollywood. Produced by Michel Legrand it was a collection of famous songs from films, and served not only as a tribute to the world of cinema, but also as a personal reference to childhood memories of sitting with her father in his projection room in Crete.

She recorded several more albums over 1996 and 1997, including the Spanish Nana Latina (which featured duets with Julio Iglesias and Mercedes Sosa), the English-language Return to Love, and the French pop classics, Hommages. In 1997, she staged a high-profile Concert for Peace at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York. This concert was later released as an album, and aired as a TV special on PBS in the United States.

On 30 May 2013, Mouskouri was awarded an honorary degree by McGill University, Canada.

UNICEF and politics

Mouskouri was appointed a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador in October 1993. She took over from the previous ambassador, the recently deceased actress Audrey Hepburn. Mouskouri's first U.N. mission took her to Bosnia to draw attention to the plight of children affected by Bosnian war. She went on to give a series of fund-raising concerts in Sweden and Belgium.

She was a Member of the European Parliament through the New Democracy party from 1994 until 1999, when she resigned from her position as an MEP. Several reasons have been given for this, one being her pacifism, and another being that she felt ill-equipped for the day-to-day work of a politician.

21st century and retirement

Mouskouri lives in Switzerland with Chapelle, and, until her final performance in 2008, performed hundreds of concerts every year throughout her career. In 2004, her French record company released a 34-CD box set of more than 600 of Mouskouri's mostly French songs. In 2006 she made a guest appearance at that year's Eurovision Song Contest which was held, for the first time ever, in her native Greece.

In the same year, she announced her plans to retire. From 2005 until 2008, she conducted a farewell concert tour of Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Asia, South America, the United States, and Canada. On July 23 and 24, 2008, Mouskouri gave her two final 'Farewell Concert' performances at the ancient Herodes Atticus Theatre, in Athens, Greece, before a packed stadium, including Greece's Prime Minister and Athens mayor, plus the mayors of Berlin, Paris and Luxembourg, along with fans from around the world and thousands of her Athenian admirers.

In 2010, in response to the financial crisis in Greece, Mouskouri announced that she would forgo her pension to contribute to the country's recovery. She commented: "Everywhere I see stories about my country going bankrupt. And people are aggressive about it. It's frightening. And it's painful for me. Nobody wants their country to be treated badly. It's frustrating and very sad."

In late 2011, Mouskouri released two newly recorded CDs, the first featuring songs of the Greek Islands, recorded with other Greek singers, and the second featuring duets with French contemporaries. In late November 2011 Mouskouri sang again at a single concert, with guests, in Berlin, commemorating the 50th anniversary of her hit single "The White Rose of Athens". She then did a concert tour in Germany in 2012.

In 2015 she was awarded with the Echo Music Prize for Outstanding achievemenents by the German music association Deutsche Phono-Akademie.

In popular culture

The British comedian Benny Hill impersonated Mouskouri on The Benny Hill Show. Wearing a long dress, large glasses and long black hair, he talked and sang with a slow and quiet voice. He introduced a song with a long translation into English of all the events supposedly mentioned in the song... and then sang just a single line of "Greek".

Andrea Martin played Mouskouri in a sketch, 'The Nana Mouskouri Story', during the 1981–1982 season of SCTV (later included in a DVD compilation.)

Ronnie Barker performed a song in drag as Mouskouri in The Two Ronnies.

Karl Pilkington included Mouskouri as a clue in his contest 'Rockbusters', part of the radio show The Ricky Gervais Show on XFM. Broadcasting on December 31, 2005, the clue was "Me granny's taking a penalty. She better get the ball in the back of the net," initials (NM) = Nana Mouskouri (nanna must score 'ere.) Gervais described this clue as "one of his best clues ever."

Autobiographies