Rita Sakellariou born 22 November 1934

 

Rita Sakellariou (born 22 November 1934,  – died 6 August 1999) was a popular Greek singer whose career began in poverty and ended in shimmering success. 

Her ardent admirers included shipping tycoons Aristotle Onassis and Stavros Niarchos, film star Anthony Quinn and Andreas Papandreou, Greece's first socialist prime minister. He once boasted that without her plaintive ballads he might not have had the strength to win three elections. His greatest pleasure was to dance a zeimbekiko to the accompaniment of Sakellariou singing her classic Istoria mou, amartia mou (My story, my sin). 

It was not always so. The singer rose from desperate poverty. Her early years mirrored many of the tribulations of modern Greece. As a child, her partisan father was killed in the 1946-49 civil war on Crete where she had been born and bred. Her mother moved with her three childen to the port of Pireaus to try and make ends meet. At 12, Sakellariou left school to help earn a living for her family selling bread and lemons in a cart she pushed around Pireaus's desolate streets. Later, in the poverty-stricken 50s, she worked in factories; and when the going got really tough - after her first marriage foundered - she gathered garbage at the slums' rubbish dump. 

All this she would recall without a trace of self-pity. It was, she said, the only way she could feed her two children by "the man who had chosen me as his wife" at the age of 14. "Such things cannot be forgotten," she told a television interviewer during one of her last public appearances. "They are what have made me who I am - an illiterate woman who has only one talent, which is to sing." Sakellariou had no formal training, but an inimitable voice endowed with emotion. 

                                  

She was discovered while performing in a neighbourhood nightclub that specialised in rebetika (the poorman's blues). Soon she began to collaborate with bouzouki players and songwriters such as Vasillis Tsitsanis - men who popularised rebetika by taking it out of its natural habitat of hashish dens, prisons and slums. Her partnership with Tsitsanis lasted eight years. In that time she shot to fame with Istoria mou, amartia mou and other songs that poignantly conjured the sadness of life with all its nostalgia, suffering and unrequited love. 

Performing across Greece, as well as America, she also starred in several Greek films. In the late 60s, she met her second husband, a wrestler who fell for her as she mesmerised an audience in Salonika. The couple married within a year and Sakellariou settled down to bring up three more sons. Throughout these years she continued to sing in the Queen Ann, a nightclub her husband had established on the National Road out of Athens. The 70s saw a series of hits, including Kathe Iliovasilema (Every Sunset) and Oi Andres kai oi Handres (Men and Beads). However, even at her peak of popularity she had problems. Record companies tried to exploit her and her attempts to come up with more commercial hits in the 80s and 90s never matched her earlier successes. Increasingly she found herself spawning imitators, although few could rival her at her best. 

In August 28, 1998, she and her friend Lakis Korres took a short vacation to Epidaurus. There she felt bad, crouching in bathroom from a terrible pain. At Hygeia Hospital, medical checks confirmed she was suffering from lung cancer which metastasized to her bones. The doctors had given her one-year to live. She immediately received chemotherapy. Around January 1999, she began to feel better and was offered to do concerts in Australia. Wearing a wig, she appeared in 5 of the 10 concerts but had to return to Greece where medical checks showed the cancer had spread to her vocal cords. 

During her last years she lived in Nea Smyrni neighbourhood of Athens. She travelled to New York for medical treatment at the Memorial Sloan–Kettering Cancer Center then spent 40 days at Hygeia Hospital in Athens where she died on 6 August 1999, aged 64. She was buried on 9 August in the First Cemetery of Athens. 

It was one of Sakellariou's many talents that throughout her long career she had the affection of Greeks across the political and social divide. They adored her voice but also her humanity and humility and her help for those less fortunate than herself. 

(Edited from Guardian obit by Helena Smith & Wikipedia)