by Dan Georgakas

I met Dimitra in the early 1970s when I was doing a story on Greeks of Hollywood for the now defunct Greek Accent. Although she only knew me from my writing, Dimitra kindly introduced me to numerous Greeks in Hollywood. This was the onset of a long friendship with repeated meetings in New York, Los Angeles, and Thessaloniki.

I especially liked hanging out with her in New York when she came to see the latest plays. At these encounters she humorously commented on the latest off-the-record Hollywood doings. She always spoke candidly about herself as well. She felt that although she had won considerable respect as an actor, she had never fulfilled her possibilities in cinema due to her hubris. After her sensational performance in The Sting, she had turned down major supporting roles in favor of starring roles that never developed as she had imagined.

Dimitra served on various Academy Award committees and was a voting member of the Academy. At Greek film festivals, when Dimitra found a film she thought worthy of world class attention, she shared her expertise with the filmmakers on how best to present their work in America. She was often frustrated when Greek filmmakers insisted on doing things their own way, which invariably disqualified them on technical grounds. Her frustration, however, did not deter her from continuing to offer her assistance whenever asked. A Greek filmmaker who heeded her counsel was Spiro Taraviras, writer and director of Buzz, a feature-length documentary on A. I. Bezzzerides, the well-known Armenian-Greek scriptwriter. As a result, Buzz was given a Screen Writers Guild testimonial screening and obtained American distribution.

Film archives will preserve Dimitra Arliss’ cinema image, but my personal image of her is that of a woman with a genuine sense of ethnic pride, what the Greeks term philotimo. Not enough Greek celebrities share her sense of community.