Wikipedia rita sakellariou biography
Ρίτα Σακελλαρίου: Η «άτακτη ζωή» μιας λαϊκής ντίβας.
Rita Sakellariou
The career of Rita Sakellariou, the popular Greek singer who has died of cancer aged 64, 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.
Wikipedia rita sakellariou biography
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 sell