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CHAPTER 2

Metropolitan Broadcast Performances

Conservative to the core, downright sexist, P. Cacoyannis instructed his overachieving eldest child Stella to become a secretary, his fey son Michael to train as a lawyer. After his 1936 knighthood, Cacoyannis père could pave the way for his children in the London metropole. In point of fact, he insisted on it. In the beginning at least, they complied.¹

After an arduous five-day journey over land and sea from Limassol to London—via Port Said, Valletta, Marseille, Calais, and Dover—Michael arrived in 1938 at Victoria station, where big sister Stella welcomed him. A top graduate of English Girls’ College in Egypt, Stella then had enrolled at St. James’s Secretarial College behind Buckingham Palace. With bishops, deans, lords, and ladies among their patrons, St. James’s promised potential employers a “lady secretary who is really efficient, intelligent, and of good birth.” With the help of his birth, his father’s connections, and his outstanding high school record, Michael had won a place to study law at Gray’s Inn, one of central London’s four great Inns of Court. So Michael would move in to the same five-floor west London boardinghouse where Stella lived. Not entirely sex-segregated, it catered to “old ladies and students.” But first things first, Michael forgot his fatigue and disregarded his aching back. (Before jetlag, long-distance travelers suffered railway spine.) He insisted he check his bags at the station, so he and Stella could go at once to the West End theatre district. On his very first night in London, the two teenagers would see a play.²

Michael knew all about it, perhaps already had read the script. Esteemed for his bold early plays such as Mixed Marriage, St. John Ervine had written his latest for—and dedicated it to—his starring actors Edith Evans and Owen Nares. Michael had watched Nares on the silver screen, and he followed the glowing reviews that made Evans England’s premiere leading lady. Although thanks to his mother Michael had attended many playhouse performances in Cyprus, including those of Greek traveling companies, tonight would be his first live performance of a major West End production. In many other respects, it was a first.³

Set in a priest’s home in present-day southern England, Robert’s Wife is a well-made comedy about the looming Second World War, as well as home front culture wars over the emancipation of women. Less than ten years after British suffragettes achieved an equal right to vote, pastor Robert’s second wife Sanchia is a dedicated physician determined to expand her clinic. Since Robert might be elevated to dean or bishop, the plot asks: Whose career comes first? Up in the cheap seats, secretarial student Stella must have marveled at the very premise. Further comparing clerics and medics irrespective of gender, the play asks: Is tending souls more important than healing bodies? Not if there’s no afterlife, the play answers. Indeed, Sanchia declares she’s “not a Christian,” her parents agnostics. She toys with other “queer” ideas such as rational atheistic altruism. Also, since Sanchia advocates birth control for women, another priest declares war on her medical practice. Already drawn to secular humanism, Michael would have identified with Sanchia’s outrage against pious reactionaries who thwart her good works.⁴

About Michael’s age, Robert’s son also is a radical. An Oxford student, pacifist, and communist who champions conscientious objection to war, he is jailed for sedition, declining appeals. Though he remains in jail on principle, the play nonetheless ends happily, as a heretofore minor character steps forward to resolve the central conflict between husband’s church and wife’s science. How? With a stunning set of revelations in the play’s final scene. “Not the marrying sort”—truly, a woman “like that”—39-year-old Miss Orley confesses that she is in love with Robert. The play hints that she’s also in love with Sanchia. So much so that she makes a large donation that saves Sanchia’s clinic and Robert’s promotion. The play closes with a riddle about appearances versus actuality, as Sanchia and Robert delight in “a very strange thought.”⁵

This evening of queer ideas and strange thoughts left Michael exhilarated, never more enamored of the theatre. In addition to acclaimed performances by Evans and Nares, Michael admired Ervine’s famed technical mastery and his allusions to classical Greek drama, notably Aristophanes’ Lysistrata. Speaking at an antiwar rally, Robert’s son proposes “a strike against motherhood. Every woman is to refuse to have more babies until armaments have been abolished.” Stella too was impressed by the evening’s entertainment, a purported comedy confronting society’s thorniest subject matter. Whatever the effect of the audience on Stella, looking down on London’s glitterati and intelligentsia, she too was spellbound by Edith Evans and her extraordinary character, who charts her unique path within and against the very house of belief, Robert’s vicarage. Doubtless named after the Queen of the Romans, Sanchia demonstrated most for Stella that educated twentieth century women could aspire to much more than secretarial work. Might this be an omen? Might Sanchia be a role model?⁶

More so, the evening for Michael foretold a rich world of abstract thinking and political possibility enacted onstage and on the streets of London. Already he had imbibed this world via film and fan magazines, back in Limassol. Now he had the chance to sample it and live it. In fact, from the late 1930s to mid-1940s, Michael carved out unprecedented freedoms for himself, as he lived away from home, away from Cyprus, for the first time in his life. Gregarious and outgoing, he cultivated new friendships and collegial relationships without difficulty, as his career took exciting unexpected turns. However, between the mid-1940s and early 1950s, all three of Michael’s siblings would come to London for extended residencies, often living with him or near him. Michael would grow ambivalent, torn between his rapidly expanding circle of associates and his family of origin. While friends continued to offer him new ways of life and work, family all too frequently impeded them. Before, during, and after World War II, London opened countless opportunities for Michael to explore gender and sexuality, not only personally but also professionally, as a consistent thematic concern in his writing. Though Stella too would find liberating possibilities in London, Michael’s siblings in the main represented stifling heteronormativity, as one after another got married and as their parents questioned them over and over about grandchildren. Not the marrying sort, Michael took advantage of London’s vast prospects to find the right occupation and, on occasion, real happiness.

The Law and Its Discontents

Though they had competed ruthlessly for their mother’s love and attention— their father forever at the office or away—Michael loved Stella and admired her. Their time together in London in the late 1930s influenced both a great deal. They conversed nonstop about the myriad attractions of Europe’s largest city, and they discovered many of those attractions together. Their boardinghouse at 140 Lexham Gardens was situated closer to Earl’s Court station than High Street Kensington. Still Michael referred to their neighborhood as toney Kensington, one of many such harmless affectations among small-town upward-striving folks transplanted to the city. Most mornings, Michael accompanied Stella to Earl’s Court and together they rode the Piccadilly line to Hyde Park Corner, where Stella would get off and walk four blocks to her college on Grosvenor Place. Michael stayed on the train until Holborn, then walked to Gray’s Inn, or changed trains in bad weather to ride one more stop to Chancery Lane. Though Michael resented his “tyrant” of a father for forcing him to study law, Gray’s Inn would serve him well, in ways not yet apparent to him.⁷

In his application to Gray’s Inn, Michael overstated his age. Though seventeen in late 1938, he claimed to be eighteen. Though the admissions committee considered well-educated well-recommended candidates of any age, Michael knew that after securing the degree and passing qualifying exams, he could be called to the bar only at age twenty-one or over. Already he hoped to finish in record time, and be done with it. But the War and the Blitz intervened.⁸

No small feat, Michael entered law school and adjusted to its routines with ease in his first year. Gray’s Inn waived an entrance exam, as Michael’s recommendations and high school transcript were exceptional. The florid Greek Gymnasium diploma, signed by the headmaster plus twenty tutors and officials, confirmed he graduated with flying colors. Of eleven subjects, he passed all, even gymnastics and scripture, with a perfect 10, except one, ancient Greek! (That score of 9—“very well”—yielded a no less admirable 9.91 grade point average for the future interpreter of Euripides.) With Stella’s help, Michael managed to strike a nice balance of work and leisure at Gray’s Inn, following her exemplary study habits. During the week, Michael attended classes and studied at the Inn library, as the boardinghouse was far too noisy. Under the library’s sweeping arches, with sixteen bays below plus sixteen above in twin galleries, he more often than not found a quiet spot and an empty chair. Michael took study breaks on the Walks, the Inn’s private gardens laid out over several acres in 1608 by Francis Bacon. Under the towering plane trees, Michael could stroll the pea-gravel paths, sit and chat with other students, or play tennis—when it wasn’t raining or freezing. Checking out the Cypriot, Egyptian, Greek, and Roman antiquities a few blocks west at the British Museum, Michael no doubt used its round reading room on occasion too. At weekday’s end, Michael returned to Lexham Gardens before or after Stella, but in time for dinner. At weekends, Stella and Michael saw a play or movie, went dancing, even dined out now and again. But their budget was tight. As their father reminded them via their mother’s letters, they should eat at home, since meals were included.⁹

By the start of Michael’s second academic year, Stella had returned to Cyprus, and France and the United Kingdom had declared war on Germany. Michael lodged with first one family then another in Hampstead. Seeing the sights of north London—Primrose Hill, Alexandra Palace, Highgate Cemetery, with Marx’s tomb—he let his study regimen slip a bit without Stella. In her absence, Michael struck up a close friendship with fellow law student Chrysanthe Clerides from Nicosia. As her father too was a lawyer, Michael understood that any outrageous misbehavior would get back to his own father, one way or another. Yet opportunities to misbehave surrounded him. A vast hilly woodland roughly the size of New York’s Central Park, Hampstead Heath doubtless enticed Michael with its longstanding reputation for easy intercourse among men at night. Even by day, quick sex could be had at its sex-segregated swimming ponds and in its remote leafiest corners.¹⁰

As biographer Donald Spoto has written about bisexuality in London at midcentury, “protracted virginity has perhaps never been found in vulgar profusion among worldly young men.” Referring to theatre people, he added “a healthy, handsome and amiable [fellow,] living and working amid a freewheeling crowd of bold young hopefuls, must have had some initiation into the carnal life. More to the point, he would have been thought remarkably strange had he kept a monastic discipline in this regard.” No stranger to sex, Michael had been initiated as an early teen in Cyprus, learning to masturbate with a male cousin. There is no evidence to suggest that he thereafter masturbated alone, or that his sexual experimentation with male friends and cousins stopped at masturbation. Common sense and the history of sexuality suggest otherwise. On the record, late in life, Michael stated that he had an affair with a friend’s wife at this time in London. The photograph he offered as proof is comical if not camp, perhaps as intended. In the black-and-white snapshot, the two stand apart, outdoors in summertime, not touching. Both have left leg cocked, but Michael’s shorts are shorter than hers, recalling his boyhood family portrait. Whereas she looks comfortable, smiling, arms at her side, he seems anxious, arms folded, left hand at his throat, as if clutching his pearls. Though his father might wish it away, many Londoners perceived what he too was beginning to accept: Michael was gay.¹¹

Whatever the distractions, Michael wanted to finish law school right away, because he didn’t “really care about the law.” Even as the German bombing of London began in 1940 and blackouts forced the library and common room to close early every afternoon, he persevered. He completed his degree in the customary three years, just after the Blitz damaged several buildings at Gray’s Inn, burned most student records, destroyed the library and 32,000 books, as well as the chapel, which Michael visited only for concerts. Staying on schedule in his fourth and final year, Michael passed his bar examinations, qualifying as a barrister-at-law. His graduation or call day ceremony was held in trinity term 1942, on 17 June, just six days after his twenty-first birthday.¹²

Gray’s Inn already had trained both Turkish Cypriot and Greek Cypriot lawyers of the male variety. The hidebound admissions committee refused female applicants until 1920, when at long last, white Englishwomen Edith Hesling, Mary Share Jones, and Robina Stevens enrolled. Two of them eventually were called to the bar, but none established a career in the law. Among first generation pioneers, Chrysanthe Clerides likewise had little reason to believe she could break open the doors of the chauvinistic legal fraternity. Michael Cacoyannis didn’t want to. Besides, there were additional obstacles. On the streets and in the chambers, Michael and Chrysanthe overheard snide remarks about their race and place. However much they claimed Greek origins, to many white people in England they were dark-skinned foreigners from the far reaches of empire. Also, as narrated in Robert’s Wife and as evidenced in the case law they had mastered, English jurists dealt severely with liberals or radicals. Women were at a distinct disadvantage; gay men even more so. Evaluating their circumstances, making astute choices within the limits of the possible, Michael and Chrysanthe used their legal training instead to break into the newish field of radio broadcasting. As Michael soon discovered, it was a perfect vehicle to inform, educate, and entertain audiences near and far— promoting high and low culture of all sorts.¹³

Empire Service, On the Radio

A massive communications bureaucracy where resourceful upstarts might find a niche to create innovative programming, the British Broadcasting Company beckoned to Michael Cacoyannis. Founded in late 1932, the BBC Empire Service grew rapidly in the late 1930s as war approached. In 1938, it launched its first foreign-language radio services in Arabic, French, German, and Italian, plus Spanish for Latin America and two Portuguese services for Brazil and Portugal. After renaming as the BBC Overseas Service, seven more languages were added in 1939, including Greek and Turkish, followed by upwards of twenty languages and dialects in 1940, among them a Cyprus Section. This exponential growth created chaos and logjams that frustrated officials eager to get new programs up and running. Most staffers still used the old moniker of Empire Service, and as African and European divisions were formed, few could agree where to place the Cyprus Section, much less how to operate it. Into this confusion and disarray stepped nineteen-year-old Michael Cacoyannis, who looked the part in neatly pressed shirt, jacket, and tie. He also talked the talk as only a verbose legal scholar could. With his can-do attitude and impatience with ineptitude, he seemed ready to take charge, despite his obvious youth. It turned out to be the best full-time job he ever held.¹⁴

But it was agonizingly long in coming. Though officials announced creation of the Cyprus service in August 1940 and vetted Cacoyannis as early as October, they had made no personnel appointments as of New Year’s. The rebooted Ministry of Information—the propaganda and publicity machine left moribund since the end of World War I—promised approvals, but dithered and delayed again and again. At long last, Michael had had enough. Of his own volition, he simply moved into an empty office in BBC Bush House and went to work. In short order, he sent the other designee sprinting headlong back to the Greek section, and he brought in Chrysanthe Clerides as second-in-command. (There were no other staffers.) By his twentieth birthday, Michael received a contract, but it would take another year and a half to nail down the appropriate pay grade for his and Chrysanthe’s positions. Meantime, they got busy broadcasting to the island colony of Cyprus, assuming it easier to ask forgiveness than permission.¹⁵

Whatever the official title (announcer/translator, programme assistant) Michael was de facto head of the Cyprus Section, overseeing all broadcast content. Though the two-person unit was small, contributors to its programming were legion. With his infectious enthusiasm, Michael recruited any number of notables passing through or based in London, especially cultural and political leaders from the city’s substantial Greek and Greek Cypriot communities. To Michael’s discredit, Turkish Cypriot content never approached their nearly 20% proportion of the island population. Even so, Michael accepted this critique and implemented suggestions for improvement. Also, by supplementing cultural programming with current events and newscasts, Michael could make his contribution to the war effort, without ever enlisting. As a gay man and pacifist, he felt he could not join the British armed forces.¹⁶

Across town at the Colonial Office, another colossal bureaucratic kerfuffle unfolded. Worried about the safety of the Cacoyannis family as prominent defenders of British rule in Cyprus, officials encouraged them to decamp. Destination? Southern Africa. In the increasingly global conflict, the Colonial Office considered the distant imperial outpost of Southern Rhodesia a less likely target of attack than Cyprus. Also, relatives on Michael’s maternal side had lived in sub-Saharan Africa for many years. Whether the Colonial Office had advised or ordered “evacuation,” the Office now seemed obligated to cover travel expenses, since “Sir P. C. is a poor man and cannot be expected to pay without embarrassment.” But would Treasury officials approve? Back and forth went the memos, letters, and secret dispatches. Countless signatures, initials, and stamps were applied, from former cricketers to slightly more meritocratic Oxbridge appointees, as the family and a few other loyalists headed south. Michael remained in London. In the end, an accounting loophole was agreed between the Colonial Office and Treasury, and the Cacoyannis family’s south African sojourn lasted nearly two years, until 1943. All three of Michael’s siblings eventually enlisted. Sensing an opportunity, Stella joined the Royal Air Force in Cairo and was made “an officer straightaway.” Yannoulla served, and George signed up for the Cyprus Regiment, reaching the rank of Lieutenant.¹⁷

In his first two years at the BBC, Michael earned the trust of his boss John Grenfell Williams, director of the African service, who insisted to others that “Mr. Cacoyannis’s instructions about the programmes must be carried out to the letter.” Michael expanded Cyprus broadcasts from five to fifteen minutes twice weekly, increasing the number and variety of presentations. In spring 1942, for example, Michael paid for a piece by linguist and translator I. Kykkotis on bigoted “Nazi Education,” with songs by Andrea Melandrinos, as well as a segment with archaeologist, grecophile, and Sunday Times movie critic Dilys Powell on “Films and Features.” Michael paid a Greek Cypriot priest for a “Spirit of Easter” message, as well as a Turkish Cypriot writer on “Women at War.” By 1946, Michael wangled a budget increase to support thrice weekly broadcasts, on Wednesday, Friday, and Sunday. Compared to the Greek service, where newscasts constituted nearly half of all programming, Michael’s Cyprus service shook things up, with a refreshing eclectic range of talks, features, music, and poetry, the last exceptionally effective in filling gaps of two minutes or less. A popular interactive component, a regular “Listeners’ Corner” segment invited and answered queries from Cyprus, as Michael adjusted programming in response to suggestions or complaints. Also, with Chrysanthe’s help, Michael turned over the microphone to far more women than the Greek service. To be sure, the war figured in many talks and features. However, Michael’s inventive musical selections minimized military marches and concert hall repertoires in order to maximize time for Greek and Cypriot folk music “specially recorded” in the studio. In addition to “light entertainment,” lengthier presentations included a monthly feature “dramatis[ing] incidents from Cypriot history.”¹⁸

Of Michael’s own sole-authored extant BBC scripts, his most accomplished and complex work is the 15-minute original radio play Nicocreon and Axiothea, rediscovered and analyzed here for the first time. Written in 1944 and broadcast at least twice, this tragedy of classical Cyprus—set in the island’s Greek city-state of Salamis, near modern Famagusta—tackles racism, misogyny, and warfare. Despite the royal title, the play opens and closes with a CHORUS OF WOMEN lamenting “the commands of fate.” Moreover, the tale is told retrospectively through Queen Axiothea’s enslaved attendant Andromache, a forerunner of Michael’s title roles for modern working-class women in films such as Stella and A Girl in Black. With four female characters, two male characters, and the women’s chorus, Nicocreon and Axiothea signals major themes that would reverberate throughout Michael’s career, notably the “the futility and folly of all wars.” As Michael later elaborated, in warfare “there can be no clear-cut victor or defeated [because] everybody suffers…. Evil begets evil and revenge begets revenge” in continuous cycles of destruction. Most forcefully, Nicocreon and Axiothea denounces the sexual assault of women, as it implies the systematic rape of wartime, challenging the very notion of women’s bodies as among the spoils of conquest—thirty years before Susan Brownmiller’s second-wave feminist classic Against Our Will. Additional provocative passages in the four-page 1500-word tragedy denounce patriarchal taboos against interracial marriage (between a “pure” Greek and a Phoenician, or Lebanese) and narrate benevolent maternal filicide in lieu of daughters’ enslavement, followed by the collective suicide of deposed King Nicocreon’s brothers, after their wives first have chosen suicide. Also, 22-year-old playwright Michael aligns himself with a rebellious skeptic, the “queer” philosopher Anaxarchus, who dies a noble death, defying “tyrant” Nicocreon. Sentenced to execution by torture, he is pounded to death in a large mortar, in a process known as braying, akin to grinding grain between stones. Refusing to recant, Anaxarchus succumbs with these searing last words: “Bray the shell of Anaxarchus, himself you cannot bray.” “End[ing] in a holocaust” to the strains of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 8 in C minor, or Pathétique, Michael’s radio play is dark, deeply disturbing, and path-breaking.¹⁹

Of course, some Cyprus Section segments went down like lead zeppelins, especially elite offerings amongst the predominantly working-class Cypriot listenership. “The Strange Customs of the Inns of Court” by Chrysanthe’s cousin Lefkos appealed to few, comic sketch “The Opera Singer Explains” by Michael’s sister Yannoulla perhaps a few more, since it lampooned pretense. BBC colleagues grumbled about nepotism, but their unexamined sexism and homophobia may have aggravated matters. Overall, by the end of the 1940s, Michael and Chrysanthe had created an impressive track record of innovative broadcasting in English, Greek, and Turkish languages and Cypriot dialects, from the popular to the highbrow. In his nearly ten years’ service to the Beeb, Michael championed the best authors, artists, and musicians he could find, while remaining attentive to the wartime and postwar anxieties of the island populace. Carving out time for his own writing, Michael also coached countless voice actors, as well as unpaid amateurs—one of whom remembered her sole line seven decades later: “Please, don’t push!”²⁰

If penning and performing in radio plays gave Michael immense satisfaction, directing and acting in stage plays proved even more alluring. With his extensive experience of broadcast production and his deep immersion in the underground and mainstream London arts scenes, he now was ready to tread the boards himself and direct even larger companies of actors.

Acting, Directing, Applying Polish

In 1942 at the tender age of twenty-one, Michael Cacoyannis qualified as a barrister-at-law and enjoyed the unqualified support of his supervisor at the African Service, which broadcast over the BBC’s dubious color-coded Brown Network. With his family in faraway Southern Rhodesia, Michael cast aside any notion of practicing law. With skill and dexterity, he navigated the London performing arts scenes, continued to write and produce radio programs, and found new opportunities to both direct and act in theatre productions, under the stage name Michael Yannis. Comfortable at the studio microphone, he now learned to project his voice in English theatres, in roles of increasingly complexity and prominence. With bit parts in film and decent roles on BBC television, he would project his image onto the consciousness of a nation supplementing love for radio with TV. Since British movie professionals had yet to found a film school, Michael’s varied stage, small, and big screen experience proved an unsurpassed method for mastering the tricks of the motion picture trade.

After an informal probationary period at the Cyprus service—in which almost no one dared contradict him—Michael joined amateur BBC troupes in two wartime productions benefiting the Aid for Russia Fund. In J. B. Priestley’s detective comedy Mystery at Greenfingers, set in a Peak District hotel with a large ensemble cast, Michael played chef Arnold Jordan. Then, in another three-act three-performance ensemble production, Michael stood out as law office manager Eric Brewer in John Van Druten’s London Wall, which earned another two performances to support Hampstead General Hospital. It also earned Michael his first review, a favorable one. The critic praised Michael’s portrayal of a “philandering” legal professional—a regular “Don Juan” having an affair with “a pretty 18-year-old typist.” True to life, Michael gave a convincing well-practiced performance of a heterosexual lawyer, “tackl[ing] this somewhat unsavoury character with skill and assurance.” Emboldened, Michael next directed and starred in two Greek-language benefit productions, Cypriot George Fasouliotis’ From One Day to Another at Bloomsbury’s Tavistock Little Theatre and Greek Dimitris Dimitriades’ Souls in War at Notting Hill’s Mercury Theatre.²¹

In addition to acting classes at the Central School of Speech and Drama, Michael found time and money for private singing lessons under soprano Beata Grenelli. Fearless on the outside, “trembling” inside, he gave a tenor recital in 1944 at London’s august Wigmore Hall, alongside soprano Marianne Jüer. Accompanied by renowned pianist Ivor Newton, the two punctuated the program—beginning, middle, and end—with popular duets from Bizet’s Carmen, Puccini’s La Bohème, and Strauss’ The Gypsy Baron. In solo numbers, they sang yet more recognized works of the French, Italian, and Austrian repertoires. However, Michael boldly offered pieces by Cypriot composer Lontos and Greek composer Kokkinos. Throughout, the recital elicited round after round of applause. “After all,” Michael said, “the room was full of friends.” Whatever the accusations of operatic elitism, Michael still considered himself a struggling performer who remained true to his roots in Limassol, whether singing Lontos or delivering lines by Fasouliotis.²²

Michael’s one-off recital helped him conquer stage fright and take on new acting and directing challenges. With three weekly evening broadcasts at the Cyprus Section sacrosanct in his calendar, Michael’s BBC workload otherwise offered flexibility. By 1947, Michael had scrimped and saved enough money for directing classes at London’s legendary Old Vic School, revived after the war by daring experimentalist Michel Saint-Denis, former head of the BBC French service. However, with bit parts in London film productions and with ever more demanding stage roles, Michael’s attendance at Old Vic classes lagged. Nonetheless Saint-Denis commended Michael’s “lively interest,” even as tutors doled out banal remarks familiar to generations of English students. “He is not without ideas,” wrote one weary tutor. “He can be quite practical.” Most of all, Michael earned the recognition of Old Vic School assistant director Cecil Clarke, who would go on to produce important films and TV dramas such as 1984’s Biko Inquest. According to Clarke, Michael “showed a keen interest [and] gained a groundwork for his future in the theatre.” For Clarke at least, that future in theatre seemed certain.²³

Michael too began to believe, as he landed first supporting, then leading, and eventual title roles on London stages. By the late 1940s, he felt confident enough to resign from the BBC to work full-time as an actor. Superiors at the BBC respected his decision and proposed an ongoing relationship of ad-hoc assignments, to Michael’s great relief and delight. Now with single-minded conviction, he answered casting calls, studied his lines, attended rehearsals, reviewed blocking, and took notes on production details. Few doubted his determination. In 1947, Michael landed a role as one of many clients of Maya, French playwright Simon Gantillon’s 1924 Mediterranean port prostitute. Evading the British monarchy’s theatre licensing—and censoring—Lord Chamberlain’s office, the “sultry” production was mounted at the members-only Arts Theatre Club at Leicester Square. In a major role that same year with non-profit co-operative Centaur Theatre Company at Rudolph Steiner Hall, Michael played Herod in Salome. Here Michael was in his element: another sexy controversial play, this time by great gay writer Oscar Wilde. One critic lauded Michael’s “powerful acting,” while another praised his commanding stage presence and voice: “He looked the part and spoke with pleasant and varied force.” In a New Theatre magazine review, Michael was included among “members of the cast [who] acquitted themselves well.” To accompany the review, Michael was depicted in a striking line drawing as Herod.²⁴

Likewise 1948 offered two roles in plays by a contemporary French writer and an Irish master. In Bernard Shaw’s Captain Brassbound’s Conversion at the Lyric Hammersmith, Michael was typecast as a southern European, Italian sailor Marzo, described by one critic as “a perfect cameo sketch.” At the Players Theatre, just off the Strand, Michael took the role of Ulysses in Armand Salacrou’s The Unknown Woman of Arras, which is told in a series of flashbacks as Ulysses contemplates suicide. “In the manner of expressionist cinema,” as theatre historian J. L. Styan explains, the play “mix[es] onstage the dead with the living. Salacrou enjoyed devising theatre games, juxtaposing styles, illogically manipulating place and time, introducing elements of parody and burlesque.” Michael was up to the challenge. In this “kaleidoscopic” play ultimately about “sex, and sex, and still more sex” according to one London critic, Michael gave “an effectively emotional performance as Ulysses, the unhappy victim.”²⁵

In 1949, Michael landed his first title role, in Algerian-born Albert Camus’ Caligula. By turns thrilled and intimidated, he prepared ceaselessly, diligently, with meticulous attention to detail. Whenever beset with self-doubt, Michael reviewed his key roles to date, in hopes that lessons learned would now see him through. With Herod in Salome, he had summoned the gravitas of ancient Rome. As Ulysses in Arras, he had grappled with the bewildering impulses of the death drive. Likewise with his own characters in Nicocreon and Axiothea, he had conjured the raping, looting, and killing of empire. Now famed French writer Camus himself was in town to oversee production of this English translation of Caligula by Gilbert Stuart.

Written before the war, Caligula is a fascinating tragedy about power, corruption, freedom, and inequality. Determining that “this world of ours … is quite intolerable”—that “men die; and they are not happy”—the Roman emperor embarks upon a radical agenda of “real revolution”: “the Great Change.” After all, “What use is the amazing power that’s mine[,] if I can’t reduce the sum of suffering[?]” So he ends religious persecution, abolishes inheritance, redistributes wealth, stops war, and nationalizes sex work. With the support of consort Caesonia, played by Fijian-born Mary Morris, Caligula kills rich men of “capital,” but in far fewer numbers than even “the smallest war”: “because I respect human life.” As an enemy concedes—and as Camus jokes—“He forces one to think…. That, of course, is why he is so much hated.” Though French critics had “greeted the play very cordially,” London reviewers reviled Camus’ rendering of this historical figure, writing off Caligula as mad, thus unworthy of attention. Camus in fact demonstrates how the Caesar goes mad over the course of three years in power, after which he “close[s] the public granaries”: “Famine begins tomorrow.” In London, the greatest proof of Caligula’s mental illness was his cross-dressing. In the spectacular opening of Act III, a curtain is parted with great fanfare on Michael’s Caligula atop a pedestal cross-dressed as Venus. More than emperor (or goddess) worship, Caligula encourages “almsgiving” among his followers, then daubs more and more red polish on his toenails. In Act IV, choreographed by David Paltenghi of Sadler’s Wells, Caligula dances in tutus to what the stage directions call “queer music,” joined in this production by Ethiopian ballerinas, sisters Desta and Menen de Wollo.²⁶

To be sure, London’s notoriously conservative theatre critics hated Camus, his play, the ballet interludes, the avant-garde, and almost all things French. They penned sweeping dismissals of existential philosophy, hoary rages against perverse absurdism, and racist defenses of “Anglo-Saxon” decency. They hated Cacoyannis too. Though a couple of critics thought his interpretation of Caligula “nobly tackled” with “much honest effort and striking power,” a couple more equivocated, while the majority lashed out. According to the Sunday Dispatch, Michael merely “pull[ed] faces.” The Telegraph declared that Michael “lacked the strength and virtuosity” for the role. The scolding turned formulaic, as if the critics had compared notes. As an actor, Michael possessed “neither the necessary range nor physical presence” (Spectator); “neither the necessary authority nor the grandeur” (Reynolds News); “neither the stature nor the vocal power” (Times). Backhanded compliments were even worse. The Evening News’ Stephen Williams judged Michael’s performance as “peevish petulant” Caligula “excellent,” “though some regretted his small stature.” Williams further belittled Michael’s Caligula, twice, as a “little fellow” and “little creature.” Oxford graduate Philip Hope-Wallace questioned Michael’s “command of English.” The Standard ruled it “an impressive performance, falling just short”—ouch—“of the dramatic skill to convince [or] interest.” Worst of all, The Sunday Times’ Harold Hobson was venomous. “Shriek[ing] for fresh experiences, Caligula yearned, I yawned, the more fortunate among us went to sleep, and a few brave souls left the theatre.” In time, Hobson was knighted. Camus won the Nobel Prize in Literature.²⁷

Michael was humiliated, wounded, and devastated. In his lowest moments, he must have feared that his father was right: a safe salaried legal career was the reasonable attainable option. But that was all too stiflingly respectable, sexist, and homophobic for Michael. To his credit, he got back up on the horse and in 1950 gave an “admirable” supporting performance in George Ralli’s The Purple Fig-Tree. No doubt, he was happy to leave London for try-outs in Cardiff and Brighton, before returning with the production to the Piccadilly Theatre. In January 1952, Michael accepted another supporting role at Theatre Royal Windsor in Dorothy and Campbell Christie’s His Excellency, at the same moment Ealing Studios released a film version with a different cast. In the end, disillusioned with British theatre, Michael began to think more and more about filmmaking.²⁸

Though typecast in roles as an Italian, Greek, or ancient Egyptian, usually uncredited, Michael relished his work as a film extra, since it exposed him to the inner workings of London area studios and the off-set gossip of European and North American stars. Over four years, he worked on at least four films by four major directors: Gabriel Pascal’s epic Caesar and Cleopatra (1945), starring Claude Rains, Vivien Leigh, and Stewart Granger; Peter Ustinov’s comic Vice Versa (1948), with Roger Livesey and a young Petula Clark; John Paddy Carstairs’ crime thriller Sleeping Car to Trieste (1948), with Jean Kent, Albert Lieven, and Paul Dupuis; and David MacDonald’s sly historical drama The Bad Lord Byron (1949), with Dennis Price, Mai Zetterling, and Joan Greenwood. All were shot in Buckinghamshire, west of London—the first three at Alexander Korda’s Denham Studios, the last at the Rank Organization’s nearby Pinewood Studios, the two eventually merging as D&P. Based on his experiences there, Michael began to ponder less expensive studio methods, as well as sites for low-cost outdoor location shooting.²⁹

Loyal to BBC colleagues as they were to him, Michael accepted roles in broadcast television that combined the liveness of theatre with many of the production techniques of film. After a seven-year wartime hiatus, U.K. television broadcasting had resumed in 1946. In 1949, Michael appeared in Kenneth Horne’s stage and television adaptations of Aldo De Benedetti’s Two Dozen Red Roses. Starting in the smaller cities—Bournemouth, Leeds, Liverpool, York—then transferring to London’s Lyric Shaftesbury Avenue, Roses is a clever drawing-room comedy of errors for five actors. Michael played what one critic called “the little Greek florist”—ooh—“the lively and amusing Popopolos, [who] sets the whole complicated machinery of the play in motion,” as he delivers bouquet after bouquet of roses, their notes yielding mistaken identities and shifty flirtations. Popular up and down the country, the play was broadcast live on BBC TV Monday evening 15 August 1949, from the Intimate Theatre, Palmers Green, North London. Michael paid close attention to production decisions, as technicians removed the first row of seats, placed three cameras, connected a monitor, hung microphones over both stage and stalls for audience reaction, installed additional lighting in the dress circle and backstage, and arranged parking for “the scanner,” the outside broadcast van. BBC crew further liaised with theatre staff to adjust make-up as well as costuming for CPS Emitron cameras. BBC host MacDonald Hobley guided viewers from beginning, through two intervals, to completion, apparently without a hitch. And so, without the second, third, or more takes of filmmaking, Michael discovered a whole new level of exhilaration and anxiety, which he managed well.³⁰

In 1952, Michael was selected to appear as Charles Constance in the first two of six episodes of crime thriller The Broken Horseshoe. The cast rehearsed in halls all over London, before an afternoon’s camera rehearsal and live performance at Studio A, Alexandra Palace, North London. Alas, as happens in murder mysteries, Michael played “Charles Constance (corpse)” in episode two, with no further appearances. The series attracted a large TV audience. As Controller Cecil McGivern declared, “The Broken Horseshoe is an obvious success and we must commission another serial from the [same] team straightaway.”³¹

However, in 1952, exhausted and depleted, Michael considered other options. He could ignore critics’ meanest remarks about his acting, but he could not deny their inescapable conclusion about his height. Claude Rains, after all, was the exception that proved the rule. Michael was simply too short for the vast majority of leading roles. Michael now gave thought to leaving London for good. Then the painful exhilarating anxiety of live television ended for all actors and spectators. In late 1958, “millions of viewers watched in horror as the young actor Gareth Jones collapsed and died during the live transmission of Armchair Theatre’s Underground.” As Donald Spoto concludes, “the change from live to filmed programmes [in the U.K.] occurred almost immediately.”³²

After the Holocaust

After liberation of the concentration camps, Nazi surrender, and VE Day, celebrating Allied victory in Europe in early May 1945, journalists had reported ecstatic street celebrations alongside articles generating existential horror over the Holocaust. The so-called Final Solution had doomed millions of European Jews to death, as many nations refused refugees from Nazi Germany, even returned them. In addition to the yellow star of David, concentration camp prisoners’ color-coded triangular badges confirmed that other groups had been targeted for persecution or elimination: Roma, communists, migrants, Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals, anti-social or “asocial” persons, and race-mixers or “defilers,” with considerable overlap among them. As Nazi eugenics and “scientific racism” intersected with other forms of human differentiation and domination, Nazi policymakers multiplied the number of outcast groups. Repeat offenders suffered additional penalties as “habitual criminals.” Though humankind always had known genocide, the scale of the Holocaust was unprecedented. Its wickedness and depravity shocked human consciousness across the globe. How could survivors go on? Where would they go? For non-Jews classed among other outcast groups in Germany and beyond, how could ordinary life resume?³³

One month after VE Day, a young English soldier wrote in his diary, “Ah sex! How obvious it is that without a satisfactorily adjusted sex life, a full and happy life is impossible.” He added, “I feel an increasing need to come out into the open—I have no more to be ashamed of than anybody else.” However, he decided, this coming out into the open “of course is impossible.” Was he, he wondered, “irredeemably homosexual”? The very question suggested its answer. After all, did any men registering as zero on the zero-to-six hetero-to-homo Kinsey scale, released in 1948, ask themselves if they were “irredeemably” or exclusively homosexual? Did bisexuals registering as three or four? Resigned to secrecy for safety’s sake, the young man wondered, should his sexual “instincts … be repressed or allowed scope”? If self-aware 22-year-old enlistee Lindsay Anderson could weigh such questions, no doubt 24-year-old pacifist and atheist Michael Cacoyannis could too. Indeed, it is most likely that, after his youthful homosexual experimentation in Cyprus, Michael enjoyed the great range of sexual opportunities in wartime and postwar London. He eventually crossed paths with Anderson, and they became good friends.³⁴

With the meager allowance from his father supplemented by his BBC salary, Michael finally could afford to rent an apartment of his own. He chose the Marble Arch neighborhood. First, from the mid 1940s, he lived at Portsea Place, in modern Portsea Hall. Never shaking inherited bourgeois pretense, he referred to it as Connaught Square, a classy 1820s rectangle just steps away, with private key gardens closed to him. Then, from the 1950s, he rented across the street from the arch itself. He called this Park Lane, famed worldwide after the 1936 invention of board game Monopoly. Michael’s address for a time indeed was 140 Park Lane, but Londoners knew the building was situated at the “top end” geographically, not the top end socially. This large late-1910s block of flats at the road’s north terminus also fronted onto busy commercial Oxford Street. As with Portsea Hall, 140 Park Lane provided easy access to Hyde Park for strolls under the trees and other leisure activities by day or night. Michael selected this neighborhood and these flats for additional reasons. Each building had a “picture palace” built onto the rear: the art deco Royal Cinema and the larger Electric Pavilion, with almost 1200 seats. Thus, Michael could watch the latest film releases in the West End or in his own backyard.³⁵

Although Michael sometimes “had been hesitant or shy about his homosexuality, he pursued sexual gratification” now, like director George Cukor, “with the same fervor he applied to his career.” Marble Arch was nigh equidistant to two of the three Turkish baths well known for gay rendezvous. Walking northwest along Edgware Road, Michael could reach the Harrow Street Baths in less than 15 minutes. Walking southeast through Mayfair he’d arrive at the Savoy Baths on Jermyn Street in just over 20. For that matter, if Michael needed to let off steam from work, he could take a long lunch or afternoon tea break, walk out of his office in Bush House, and proceed 20 minutes directly up the street to the Imperial Baths in Russell Square. Back in his neighborhood at night, Michael knew how to avoid gay-bashers who sometimes prowled Hyde Park in packs. If he stayed close to Hyde Park Corner, at Park Lane’s south end, he could remain both in the dark and near the streetlights—that is, both anonymous and safe.³⁶

With a free hand at the BBC and some free time between shows, Michael’s period living alone in England proved liberating but all too brief. One sibling after another moved to London and moved into Portsea Hall. After meeting a British naval officer, younger sister Yannoulla announced they were getting married. Long attracted to wealth, Yannoulla had found an aristocrat of a sort, since Bill Wakefield’s father was the geographer and Boy Scout patron William Birkbeck Wakefield, appointed MBE, a non-hereditary title. As Yannoulla remembered, laughing, “it was a posh wedding” at the King’s Chapel of the Savoy in 1945, followed by a reception at the Savoy Hotel, on the Strand in London. Directing another stagey performance, “Michael gave me away” and “organized everything.” Yannoulla and Bill moved into a home southwest of London in Surrey.³⁷

In early 1946, for the first time in his life, Michael visited Greece. His trip to Athens was enchanting but paradoxical. Schooled in the classics, arriving “with the awe and humility of a pilgrim,” he went directly to the Acropolis, which was closed for ten days because “the guard was on strike.” Throughout the city, the faces of mothers “betray[ed] heavy and anxious hearts[,] their foreheads furrowed and their eyes burning with the search for food, lack of sleep, and tears.” As he realized, even after the end of Nazi occupation, deprivation, hunger, and anger had intensified in the war’s aftermath. Even so, evenings excited Michael, the “bright lights on the streets, the shop windows, and the places of amusement, [all] crowded and lively.” At the cafes, talk amongst bohemians energized him, as he eavesdropped then got acquainted with intellectuals, including former members of the resistance to occupation, many communist. As he learned, even pacifists celebrated Oxi Day each year, commemorating Greece’s refusal of Mussolini’s ultimatum: Oxi meaning No! Over coffee, wine, and ouzo, rancorous disagreements with “deep historical and racial causes” foreshadowed the Greek Civil War, which would break out later in the year. It pitted rightwing militarists backed by the U.K. and U.S. against communists supported by Greece’s neighbors Albania, Bulgaria, and Yugoslavia.³⁸

Foremost, Michael “had the good luck to meet … artists” such as gay war veteran Yannis Tsarouchis, who after “the terrible experiences of recent years, show[ed] a profound understanding of the situation…. Their words sp[oke] of their sensitiveness, their great suffering, their optimism and their unfailing faith in Greece.” Echoing the sentiments of others, Michael determined that 36-year-old Tsarouchis was wise beyond his years. With appropriate discretion, Tsarouchis became a gay mentor to 24-year-old Michael. So moved was Michael in describing his Athens journey that he reassessed his own racial and national allegiances. Working on his script for a talk on the Cyprus service, he at first typed that he felt “like a Greek.” Then he x-ed it out and retyped it, to identify “as a Greek”—“a friend of every other Greek I would meet.”³⁹

Just before Athens, Michael had returned to Cyprus for the first time since 1938. As head of the BBC Cyprus service, broadcast across the island, Michael discovered he was a celebrity. Civic groups in Nicosia invited him to speak on a variety of topics ranging from BBC operations to life in wartime London. Even these he peppered with a poetry reading from Greek Olympic Hymn lyricist Kostis Palamas, who died in Nazi-occupied Athens just two years earlier. In Limassol, Michael met the latest additions to his large extended family and got reacquainted with others, including a nine-year-old cousin he’d last held as a baby, Maria Pitta. They had been instantly drawn to each other, and ever since, Michael’s mother had loaned the girl many of Stella and Michael’s books. Exercising his power over relatives, Michael told her parents they shouldn’t call her Maria: “Oh, what a common name!” As his cousin recalls, “He was an admirer of Marlene Dietrich, and he said, ‘Why don’t you call her Marlene?’ That’s how I got my name. I changed it afterwards” from the baptismal name Maria. “In my passport, I am Marlene.” Ironically enough, her namesake, Berlin’s famous bisexual non-believer, was named for Mary Magdalene, hence Marlene.⁴⁰

From household to household, Michael doled out presents to relatives. Back home, he offered gifts to his parents. To his mother, he likely gave a bottle of Penhaligon’s perfume. To his father, Michael presented his framed degree from Gray’s Inn. Michael wouldn’t need it anyway, he said, since he would never practice law. Furious at the impudence, Cacoyannis père exploded. Long disgusted with Michael as prissy, he announced he would no longer support this sissy. He cut Michael off. No more allowance. Anticipating it, Michael put his legal education to good use, fashioning a clever rejoinder. No, Michael would never join the family firm. However, since 21-year-old brother and war veteran George now proposed to study law, and since George knew little of London, next to nothing of Gray’s Inn, it was surely best that he move in with Michael at Portsea Hall—if their father paid the rent. After cooling off and discussing it with their mother, P. Cacoyannis agreed. Meeting with “Listeners’ Corner” correspondents during his final week in Cyprus, then transiting through Athens, Michael returned to London to enjoy his last several months of freedom: freedom from his family of origin, freedom to imbibe gay culture.⁴¹

Two Greek-Cypriot barristers from Limassol recommended George to Gray’s Inn, and he was accepted to study law from early October 1946. Already workers had repaired many blitzed buildings, refitted stained glass windows removed as precaution, and constructed new temporary premises for the library, which Winston Churchill opened with fanfare. Michael gave George a job the very week he began at Gray’s Inn, assigning him the previous month’s news roundup. George had to read all the English reporting on Cyprus; prioritize, condense, and summarize it; then broadcast it over the Cyprus service. Increasingly identifying as communist— moved by Soviet war casualties, impressed by their nation’s sacrifices, and appalled by the Holocaust—George delivered an informative sympathetic account of Jews en route to Palestine trapped in Cyprus. George led with Fyfe Robertson’s Picture Post account of Jewish migrants detained near Famagusta in conditions reminiscent of the concentration camps. An additional paragraph, censored or cut for brevity, would have informed Cypriots that “Jews [were] seeking sanctuary from persecution [due to] the failure of the Great Powers to tackle the problem.” Nor was mention made of the vast indigenous Palestinian populations who greatly outnumbered Jewish settlers. As George also reported, protests continued in Cyprus against the imprisonment of eighteen trade union leaders of a miners’ strike. The Times of London parroted the colonial public prosecutor, who explained “the preaching [sic] of Marxism is prohibited in Cyprus by law.” Reporting on this dubious law, George thereby questioned its validity. As for his first year at Gray’s Inn, aside from flouting the rules against outside employment, George acquitted himself admirably.⁴²

The next year, in a stunning development, Stella enrolled at Gray’s Inn. Foil to George’s radical politics, Stella’s moderate centrism must have convinced their father in the end to support her application, regardless of gendered expectations, ever more conscious of her great abilities. In any case, he already paid rent on a London flat, and she could secure a public maintenance grant for students. Twenty-seven years after Mary Share Jones broke the barrier against women, Gray’s Inn still had not altered its application form. So Stella had to scratch out the word “son” and write that she was the “eldest daughter of Sir Panayiotis Cacoyannis[,] Advocate.” Not wishing to overtax George’s referees, Stella found two more lawyers from Limassol who agreed to recommend her. They instructed their secretaries to strikethrough the words “him” and “gentleman” on the standardized form and retype accordingly, so that each man could affirm, “I believe her to be a lady of respectability and a proper person to be admitted.” In Stella’s cohort, scarcely seven percent of students were women: eight out of 116. Of these women, Stella was the only one from outside Northwestern Europe. Gray’s Inn publication Graya listed these eight women as “Miss” or, in one case, “Mrs.” Men’s marital status was not provided. The new class members were listed not alphabetically but “by seniority.” At 27, Stella fell at the midpoint or median age, which was higher than normal after the war. Now, the Royal Air Force veteran would show everyone her capacities and her dedication to the law. In junior moot court during her second year, for example, Stella and her co-counsel successfully represented Fairdeal Insurance in a complicated negligence case between car buyer Nitwit and seller Toper, who was behind the wheel in a drunken crash badly injuring Nitwit.⁴³

As Stella too moved into Portsea Hall, Michael’s performances in the provinces gave him respite from family, as did visits to London moviehouses and bathhouses. As historian Mark Glancy has shown, “many people went to the cinema simply to stay warm [or] to get away from their family or fellow lodgers in crowded accommodation.” “Or, if they were away from home,” Glancy added, as when Michael was on the road for try-outs or with touring productions, they could “find comfort in a familiar form of entertainment.” Likewise, whether Hyde Park in London or River Ouse footpaths in York, an ordinary evening walk could free Michael of relatives and increase opportunities to meet men. Back in London, as scholar Matt Houlbrook has demonstrated, men of all classes socialized and had sex at Turkish bathhouses, particularly the two near Marble Arch and the one near Michael’s office, where in all likelihood he met Lindsay Anderson, who began making documentary films in the late 1940s. Because men like Michael lived with family members and next door to nosy neighbors, they desperately needed these inconspicuous safe spaces. Bringing gay friends or sex partners home would have generated suspicion, fueled rumors, and ultimately risked imprisonment. Soon enough, Gray’s Inn graduate David Maxwell Fyfe, as Home Secretary, would make gay men’s existence a living hell.⁴⁴

Meanwhile among the marrying kind, countless couples went down the aisle after the war. For Michael’s friends and for one sibling, mixed marriages were unexceptional. Yannoulla had married Englishman Bill Wakefield in 1945, and the Church of England ceremony at King’s Chapel was supplemented with a Greek Orthodox service. In a 1947 London civil ceremony, Chrysanthe’s brother Glafcos Clerides married her BBC colleague and friend Lila Erulkar, a Jewish Indian who much later converted to Greek Orthodoxy. In 1948 and 1949, George and Stella married partners from closer to home. George wed Cypriot Phaedra Makrides, who also enrolled, albeit briefly, at Gray’s Inn. Then, Stella wed Greek medical student Dimitri Soulioti. About the time Dimitri qualified as a radiotherapist and diagnostician, Stella gave birth to their daughter. Delayed by a mere five months as compared to her brothers, “Mrs. Soulioti” was called to the bar in late 1951, defying the odds. Michael’s friend and George’s wife Phaedra was not so fortunate. With Phaedra soon expecting a child too, Marble Arch was bursting at the seams with Cacoyannis kith and kin. Given the great expense of London, new mothers Stella and Phaedra considered the advantages of childrearing in Limassol, with all the love, support, and free childcare offered by a large extended family. Also, siblings Stella and George pondered opportunities for gainful employment in the family law firm, as Michael reached a turning point.⁴⁵

*

Aside from withering reviews of Caligula and claustrophobic home life in Marble Arch, London had been very good to Michael. Excelling at the BBC, he promoted Cypriot arts and culture, as he broadcast a variety of groundbreaking programs to the island colony. At respected conservatories, he took classes in acting and directing, he began to master both, and he increasingly defied convention on and off stage. Even as his most provocative performances disgusted England’s conservative critics, Michael honed his skills in countless performances in the provinces and in London. With time, he adapted and re-envisioned his stagecraft for new media, landing roles in major productions for radio, television, and film. Ironically, so-called bit parts as a movie extra may have opened Michael’s broadest window of opportunity. Through careful observation, he studied the techniques of Scottish director MacDonald, Hungarian-born Pascal, and Londoners Carstairs and Ustinov. When not broadcasting, acting, directing, or cruising, Michael learned even more in cinema and theatre audiences, watching these and many other movies and plays, as well as operas at Covent Garden. A fervent reader of the American, British, and European press, he learned more still, as he analyzed the varied critical response to these works, along with heated debates over cultural production more broadly. Michael sought out the most intelligent critics and invited the best, such as Dilys Powell, into his BBC studio.

The metropole moreover enlarged Michael’s knowledge of global affairs and sharpened his critiques of socioeconomic inequities. He arrived a feminist; he would leave a confirmed pacifist, atheist, and humanist. Though he offered the obligatory genuflections to empire, in part to keep his job, he grew to advocate its dissolution. Despite that, he came to promote not independence for Cyprus, but enosis, integration with Greece, after his beguiling trip to bohemian Athens. Michael’s critiques of racial inequalities, especially miscegenation restrictions, were subtle but no less profound, as he wove the weighty subject of intermarriage into his most important radio play Nicocreon and Axiothea. Beyond Marble Arch, Michael cultivated a broad multiracial cosmopolitan circle of colleagues and friends.

Surveying his offspring, the four children he had sent abroad with blunt instructions to get educated and get ahead in life, Michael’s father lamented the great breadth of the outcome. On the postwar European political spectrum, only Yannoulla’s views were as conservative as her father’s. Stella was a centrist, Michael liberal, George communist. Homeric arguments across the generations characterized visits to Cyprus. More and more, Michael imagined a life at odds with—and at a safe remove from—his family of origin.