Maria Callas: La Divina - A Portrait

No other opera singer this century has aroused such public interest, such adulation and such controversy as Maria Callas, "La Divina Assoluta."Her dramatic and musical reincarnations of operatic heroines were invested with a psychological depth which made her performances and recordings definitive, and her records still outsell every other major classical singer.She transformed herself from being an overweight ugly duckling into a dazzling beauty, inspired by the sylph-like Audrey Hepburn.She was labeled a "tigress" for her temperamental image; others thought her behavior so unforgivable she was pelted with eggs, but her unique and haunting voice and personality dominated public life in the 1950s and early 1960s.Tony Palmer's award-winning film charts her rapid rise to fame and offers a glimpse into the private life of this remarkable woman -- her marriage to Meneghini, her disastrous and humiliating affair with Aristotle Onassis and her emotional collapse in the last ten years of her life, which her lived more or less silently in desperate loneliness.The film includes extensive archival film, location filming in Athens, Rome, Milan, New York and London, and interview with those who witnessed her rise and fall.