Greek actor Stratos Tzortzoglou has revealed that his mother was fourteen years old and living in an orphanage when she became pregnant with him, a fact he said he only learned decades later during a medical test.
Tzortzoglou, a stage and screen actor with a long career in Greek theatre and television, told journalist Giannis Vitsas on Espresso that the discovery came up during an examination for dyslexia, when the specialist who read his results, whom he addressed as Mrs Evangelopoulou, told him he could ask his mother whether she had been behind bars when she gave birth to him.
He said he told her that could not be right, because his mother had conceived him at fourteen and given birth to him at fifteen, so there was no time for her to have gone to prison. The specialist told him to go and ask his mother anyway.
According to Tzortzoglou, when he confronted his mother she denied it at first. When he pressed her, asking whether she had actually been in an orphanage rather than a prison, she went cold and asked who had told him. He explained what he had learned, and she later came to him and did what he described as a "sound weaning" session, reading him a fairy tale so that he could hear what he called the ideal voice a foetus is meant to hear from its mother.
Tzortzoglou said the same specialist told him his test results showed he was not simply dyslexic but severely so, and that she marvelled at how he had managed to survive, adding that if he had not gone into theatre he would probably have ended up in a psychiatric institution.
Escape from the orphanage and the conception
Explaining how his parents met, Tzortzoglou said his mother was placed in an orphanage at fourteen because his grandfather had seven mouths to feed after the family left the island of Kefalonia following the death of his grandmother, Katerina, and had no money to support her.
While in the orphanage she fell ill and was taken to a hospital, where she met Tzortzoglou's father. He was involved at the time with another woman who had just lost the child she had been carrying. He and Tzortzoglou's mother became friends, and for a month he came to see her outside the orphanage railings, eventually asking her to climb over them so he could take her to see the Wall of Death, a motorcycle stunt act performed inside a circular wooden arena.
Tzortzoglou said his mother climbed the fence with his father's help and the pair went to Filopappou Hill in Athens, where after watching the Wall of Death act at a circus they had sex, which was when he was conceived. He said his mother only realised she was pregnant three or four months later, when her stomach began to swell. She was sent back to the orphanage, and his father kept visiting her there.
His grandfather did not want his father as a match, Tzortzoglou said, because he was a sailor and, in his words, "the Kourkoulos of his day," at nineteen and unable to support himself, let alone a wife. In her despair at not being allowed to marry him, Tzortzoglou's mother took a razor and cut her arms twelve times. He said she was a child herself and not in her right mind at the time, but because she did it inside the orphanage rather than outside, staff were able to save her. She and his father were eventually allowed to marry, and Tzortzoglou said he was born carrying the weight of those traumas.
His father's release from prison
Tzortzoglou also described the events that led to his father spending time in prison. He said his father stabbed a man during a fight sparked by jealousy over his mother, and was jailed for a period as a result.
His earliest memory of his father, he said, was a visit to the island of Aegina, where the prison gates opened and his father walked out beaming as though he had won an Oscar. His mother whispered in his ear that the man was his father.
Tzortzoglou said that on his first day of freedom his father put him, then three years old, on the back of a rented motorbike and rode wheelies through a forest that overlooked the prison, laughing and repeatedly telling him they were free. He said he later did the same thing with his own son, Alkiviadis, joking that he had inherited his father's recklessness.
