CBC Digital Archives

Teresa Stratas, opera star and film actor

Since the Canadian Opera Company's inaugural eight-day season in 1950, the company has introduced some of the world's greatest singers, commissioned works by Canadian composers and librettists and devised innovative ways of attracting audiences. From that very first performance to the long-awaited opening of a new home at the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts, CBC Digital Archives goes backstage with the Canadian Opera Company.

With a composure, eloquence and confidence that belies her youth, 22-year-old Teresa Stratas talks to CBC Radio's Joy Davies about her fresh successes at the Metropolitan Opera in New York and her latest venture, a 20th Century Fox film called The Canadians. She talks about the difference between emoting for someone on the sixth balcony and performing for a camera inches from her face, compares her usual musical repertoire to the film's song This is Canada and chats about her future as a singer and actor.
• Teresa Stratas, a first-generation Canadian of Greek heritage, was born in Toronto on May 26, 1938. She studied at the city's Royal Conservatory of Music under Irene Jessner.
  • According to a 1961 article in the Ottawa Citizen, Stratas spent much of her youth in a movie theatre owned by friends of her parents. There she memorized roles and songs including her early favourite, Pistol Packin' Mama, from the 1943 movie of the same name.

• Her operatic debut came in 1959 when Stratas was just years old. She performed with the Toronto Opera Festival (which later became the Canadian Opera Company) as Mimi in Puccini's La Bohème. Stratas went on to a stellar career as one of the world's great sopranos. She performed in every major opera house and sang every major soprano role.

• The Canadian Encyclopaedia of Music says, "Stratas possessed a lyric soprano, smooth and rich throughout its range. Her singing was allied to a strong stage personality and an instinctive and communicative dramatic sense. She was endowed with a delicate sense of comedy, but she yielded most completely to those roles demanding direct emotional expression."

• Stratas's appearance as the "White Squaw" in the 1961 film The Canadians was just the beginning of her career in films. She mostly performed in film and television productions of operas, but she finished her acting career by winning a Gemini for her role as the controlling mother of an autistic child (Megan Follows) in a 1995 Canadian film entitled Under the Piano.

• Stratas was a notable interpreter of the music of German composer Kurt Weill. She formed a close bond with Weill's widow, Lotte Lenya, who gave Stratas copies of previously unpublished songs by Weill, some of which Stratas recorded. Stratas was to nurse Lenya through her final days.

• For most of the 1980s and large portions of the 1990s, Stratas left the opera stage and screen to work first with Mother Teresa at an orphanage in Calcutta and later at a hospital in Hungary.

• Among her many honours, Stratas has been made an Officer of the Order of Canada (1972). She received a Governor General's Performing Arts Award (2000) and was added to Canada's Walk of Fame (2001). She has been awarded honorary degrees from colleges and universities in both Canada and the U.S.

Medium: Radio
Program: Assignment
Broadcast Date: March 2, 1961
Guest(s): Teresa Stratas
Interviewer: Joy Davies
Duration: 5:32
Photo: Courtesy of the Ottawa Citizen.

Last updated: February 16, 2012

Page consulted on March 22, 2013

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