In Pablo Larrain’s Maria, Angelina Jolie will play a twitchy, headstrong, tempestuous performer…no day at the beach!

Lonely, unhappy and temperamental, Maria Callas spent her last years living largely in isolation in Paris. She died of a heart attack at age 53 on 9.16.77.

Who dies at 53 from a heart attack? A non-obese person, I mean.

A funeral was held at St. Stephen’s Greek Orthodox Cathedral on rue Georges-Bizet, Paris on 9.20.77. Callas was later cremated at the Père Lachaise Cemetery. Her ashes were ultimately scattered over the Aegean Sea, off the coast of Greece, in the spring of ‘79.

During a 1978 interview, Callas’s friend John Ardoin said the following:

“There are times, you know, when there are certain people who are blessed and cursed, with an extraordinary gift, in which the gift is almost greater than the human being. And Callas was one of these people.

“It was almost as if her wishes, her life, her own happiness were all subservient to this incredible, incredible gift that she was given, this gift that reached out and taught us all – taught us things about music we knew very well, but showed us new things, things we never thought about, new possibilities.

“I think that’s why singers admire her so; I think that’s why conductors admire her so; I know that’s why I admire her so. And she paid a tremendously difficult and expensive price for this career.

“I don’t think she always understood what she did or why. She knew she had a tremendous effect on audiences and on people. But it was not something that she could always live with gracefully or happily.

“I once said to her, ‘It must be very enviable to be Maria Callas.’ And she said, ‘No, it’s a very terrible thing to be Maria Callas, because it’s a question of trying to understand something you can never really understand.”