Angelina Jolie 'spellbinding' as opera star Callas

Angelina Jolie was in London on Friday as her opera singer bio pic about Maria last Callas opened across the United Kingdom.

Maria is the third major movie about a high-profile complicated woman in a row by Chilean director Pablo Larraín, after movies about Jacqueline Kennedy and Princess Diana.

Screenplay by Steven Knight, the creator of Peaky Blinders , is based on the last three years of Callas’s life in the 1970s, spent in Paris.

The film has given sort of a career resurgence to Jolie who has been taking acting roles comparatively sparingly in the recent years and the movie may just earn her an Oscar nomination in the best actress category.

Callas was a US-born Greek soprano who was among the most famous singers opera singing industry. She died in 1977 aged 53.

In Maria, Jolie’s own voice is combined with new recordings that were made by Callas.

Speaking to the Hollywood Reporter about Callas in August, Jolie said: I’m sure there is much that will be made of our similarities as women but one things which I’m not sure either of us are very comfortable with is being public.

“And there was a pressure behind the working that isn’t just the joy of the work.”

Asked why she had been taking on fewer film roles in recent years, Jolie explained: ‘It meant I was home more with my kids.’

However, she went on, she can now go back because her children are ‘a bit older, getting more independent… I am a nuisance in the house and hence can afford to leave for one or several days”.

The reception for the film has been average but by far the leading actor of the film received a lot of appreciation from critics.

Maria Callas is played by Angelina Jolie who delivers an elegant, determined character, according to Sophia Ciminello of AwardsWatch. The cast: ‘She doesn’t disappear in to the role she actually goes beyond.’

As giving a “virtuoso lead performance from Jolie and excellent technical facets throughout the board”, according to Next Best Picture’s Ema Sasic, “Maria is the victorious high C for Larraín to complete his trilogy”.

Said Entertainment Weekly’s Maureen Lee Lenker: ‘It is in Jolie’s portrayal of a woman whose anger is a result of her owning everything she is, where the real singing comes in’.

‘It is a powerful portrayal of a woman’s subjective experience of the world when, it seems, everything has turned against her physically’.

Time magazine’s Stephanie Zacharek felt otherwise: Jolie ‘plays her subject as cool and classy and insecure in equal measure but none of this conveys the imperious charm of her subject’.

‘It doesn’t help his movie when Larraín writes-off the final credits to genuine footage of Maria Callas’… this one vibrant icon all that the film lacked by Jolie & Larraín.

Vanity Fair's Richard Lawson was also a little cooler on the movie, writing: It has still something rather arbitrary, something inaccurate about the film.

“If one removes some specifics, Maria can be any prima donna – this sketch of a woman mincing through the last days of her life.”

Jolie's previous film credits include Changeling, Maleficent, Salt, Mr & Mrs Smith, The Bone Collector and Lara Croft: Tomb Raider.

Maria will be out in theatres in the UK on the tenth of January.