Last Sunday (21/1) “Famagusta” premiered at Mega. The long-awaited series of Andrea Georgiou, Vana Dimitriou, Koullis Nikolaou, moved the viewers, who embraced it, with the first episode recording particularly high viewing figures.
The great Greek actress Despina Bembedeli received rave reviews from the viewers, who were moved to see her play Harita Mantoles, the female symbol of Cyprus, who saw Turkish soldiers execute her own people in cold blood.
Despina Bembedeli was born on February 10, 1941 and has had a great career as an actress. She is married to Greek Cypriot actor Stelios Kavkaridis. The couple has been married since 1966 and during their marriage they have had two children: the sports writer Theodoros and the actress Marianna Kavkaridou.
The couple settled permanently in Cyprus in 1968, while a few years later they also experienced the Cypriot tragedy.
In an interview on the entertaining Cypriot show “Come and see”, Stelios Kavkaridis, talking about Despina Bembedeli, had said: “I admire her, the time is coming when I say “How does he manage?” I was also a little lazy throughout my career. Despina came at times when we didn’t know where she was. He was inside the house, but we didn’t know where he was.
He read, he studied, and all this study came to light. Now he does and I’m dumbfounded. Her energy comes from the theater and she says it. He says: “Only if I understand that I can no longer speak, say what I want to say and how I want to, will I stop. Now I work because I like it and I want to”.
“Although we often worked together, we advised each other if asked. We have also done work together, in the sense that Despina directed me many times in difficult projects. He was not jealous of each other, we rejoiced in our successes“, he said afterwards.
Regarding how they met, he explained that: “We met at Karolos Koon’s school in the 60s. We were playing in the same play, it was two plays, by Ionesco. Despina was a nurse and had a cross on her cap. One day the cross fell and they lost it and they were looking for it and I found it and took it to her.
That was it, it was over, from then on we were together. It was the innocent flirtation of the time at the beginning, I accompanied her to take the bus at night to go home. We didn’t spend as much time with each other as we would have liked, and we didn’t spend as much time with our children as we should have.”