John Howard - Truths Up His Sleeve - The Times of Michael Cacoyannis

Meanwhile among the marrying kind, countless couples went down the aisle after the war. For Michael’s friends and for one sibling, mixed marriages were unexceptional. Yannoulla had married Englishman Bill Wakefield in 1945, and the Church of England ceremony at King’s Chapel was supplemented with a Greek Orthodox service. In a 1947 London civil ceremony, Chrysanthe’s brother Glafcos Clerides married her BBC colleague and friend Lila Erulkar, a Jewish Indian who much later converted to Greek Orthodoxy. In 1948 and 1949, George and Stella married partners from closer to home. George wed Cypriot Phaedra Makrides, who also enrolled, albeit briefly, at Gray’s Inn. Then, Stella wed Greek medical student Dimitri Soulioti. About the time Dimitri qualified as a radiotherapist and diagnostician, Stella gave birth to their daughter. Delayed by a mere five months as compared to her brothers, “Mrs. Soulioti” was called to the bar in late 1951, defying the odds. Michael’s friend and George’s wife Phaedra was not so fortunate. With Phaedra soon expecting a child too, Marble Arch was bursting at the seams with Cacoyannis kith and kin. Given the great expense of London, new mothers Stella and Phaedra considered the advantages of childrearing in Limassol, with all the love, support, and free childcare offered by a large extended family. Also, siblings Stella and George pondered opportunities for gainful employment in the family law firm, as Michael reached a turning point. 45

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Aside from withering reviews of Caligula and claustrophobic home life in Marble Arch, London had been very good to Michael. Excelling at the BBC, he promoted Cypriot arts and culture, as he broadcast a variety of groundbreaking programs to the island colony. At respected conservatories, he took classes in acting and directing, he began to master both, and he increasingly defied convention on and off stage. Even as his most provocative performances disgusted England’s conservative critics, Michael honed his skills in countless performances in the provinces and in London. With time, he adapted and re-envisioned his stagecraft for new media, landing roles in major productions for radio, television, and film. Ironically, so-called bit parts as a movie extra may have opened Michael’s broadest window of opportunity. Through careful observation, he studied the techniques of Scottish director MacDonald, Hungarian-born Pascal, and Londoners Carstairs and Ustinov. When not broadcasting, acting, directing, or cruising, Michael learned even more in cinema and theatre audiences, watching these and many other movies and plays, as well as operas at Covent Garden. A fervent reader of the American, British, and European press, he learned more still, as he analyzed the varied critical response to these works, along with heated debates over cultural production more broadly. Michael sought out the most intelligent critics and invited the best, such as Dilys Powell, into his BBC studio.

The metropole moreover enlarged Michael’s knowledge of global affairs and sharpened his critiques of socioeconomic inequities. He arrived a feminist; he would leave a confirmed pacifist, atheist, and humanist. Though he offered the obligatory genuflections to empire, in part to keep his job, he grew to advocate its dissolution. Despite that, he came to promote not independence for Cyprus, but enosis, integration with Greece, after his beguiling trip to bohemian Athens. Michael’s critiques of racial inequalities, especially miscegenation restrictions, were subtle but no less profound, as he wove the weighty subject of intermarriage into his most important radio play Nicocreon and Axiothea . Beyond Marble Arch, Michael cultivated a broad multiracial cosmopolitan circle of colleagues and friends.

Surveying his offspring, the four children he had sent abroad with blunt instructions to get educated and get ahead in life, Michael’s father lamented the great breadth of the outcome. On the postwar European political spectrum, only Yannoulla’s views were as conservative as her father’s. Stella was a centrist, Michael liberal, George communist. Homeric arguments across the generations characterized visits to Cyprus. More and more, Michael imagined a life at odds with—and at a safe remove from—his family of origin.

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