Melina and Hydra will shine forever in your "Phaedra".
Dem
ATHENS, Greece (AP) — American director Jules Dassin, whose Greek wife, Melina Mercouri, starred in his hit movie "Never on Sunday," died Monday, officials said. He was 96.
The cause of death was not made public. A spokeswoman for Hygeia hospital said only that he had been treated there in the past two weeks.
Dassin, a leftist activist whose more than 20 films also included "Topkapi," abandoned Hollywood in 1950 during the Communist blacklisting era.
Five years later, he won wide acclaim for "Rififi," famous for its long, dialogue-free heist sequence. The movie won him the best director prize at the Cannes Film Festival, where he met Mercouri.
He married the actress and politician in 1966 and settled permanently in Athens. Dassin directed his wife in seven films, including 1960's "Never on Sunday," in which she gained international notice for her portrayal of a kindhearted prostitute.
After Mercouri's death in 1994, Dassin focused on her main unrealized goal while she was Greece's culture minister: trying to persuade the British Museum to return the Elgin Marbles, a large collection of sculptures taken from the Parthenon by a Scottish diplomat nearly 200 years ago.
In 1980, Dassin made the Canadian-backed film "Circle of Two," starring Richard Burton as an aged artist with a romantic fixation on a teenage student, played by Tatum O'Neal. Dassin was disheartened by its weak box office performance and never made another film.
