Personal details
Born:
- Birthday: 1974-12-31
- Born Place: Athens, Greece
Also Known As:
Aggeliki Papoulia
Angeliki Papoulia
Angeliki Papoulia is an internationally acclaimed Greek actress and director, widely recognized as a central figure of the "Greek Weird Wave" through her frequent collaborations with director Yorgos Lanthimos. Born in Athens, she received her education at the Department of Theatre Studies at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens and graduated from the Empros Theatre Drama School in 2000. She skyrocketed to global prominence for her unsettling and powerful performance as the "Older Daughter" in Lanthimos’s Academy Award-nominated Dogtooth (2009), for which she won the Heart of Sarajevo for Best Actress. She continued her partnership with Lanthimos in his follow-up films Alps (2011) and the English-language hit The Lobster (2015), where she played the "Heartless Woman." Her film career is marked by a preference for challenging, uncompromising roles in auteur cinema, including Syllas Tzoumerkas’s A Blast (2014) and The Miracle of the Sargasso Sea (2019), the latter of which earned her the Hellenic Film Academy Award for Best Actress. Beyond the screen, Papoulia is a prolific force in European theater. In 2004, she co-founded the blitz theatre group, an influential collective where she served as a writer, director, and performer until 2017, presenting works at major festivals such as the Festival d'Avignon and the Barbican Centre. Her recent filmography remains highly active, featuring in projects like Human Flowers of Flesh (2022), Silence 6-9 (2022), and To a Land Unknown (2024). In the 2026 drama I Was a Stranger, she takes on the role of Helena, contributing to the film's ensemble portrayal of lives upended by the refugee crisis. Papoulia has also served on juries for several prestigious international film festivals, including the Berlinale and Locarno.
