Papas built her career in Greece in the 1940s and 50s, and was soon championed by the Greek-American film director Elia Kazan, who had her read for him in 1954. MGM gave her a contract the following year, though the only resulting film was a 1956 Western called Tribute to a Bad Man, which starred James Cagney. In 1961, she appeared in the World War II film The Guns of Navarone, which was partly shot on the Greek island of Rhodes. It was 1964’s Zorba the Greek, however, that truly brought her international stardom; she played a young widow stoned and then killed by her fellow villagers for taking a lover.
