Maria Callas

Born in Manhattan in 1923 to Greek immigrants and an overbearing mother who'd wanted a son, Maria Callas was raised in Astoria before moving to Greece at 13 for her musical education. She built her career in Italy through the 1940s, performing nearly blind onstage and navigating wartime poverty, her bel canto technique and dramatic intensity pulling her through classical opera seria to Donizetti, Bellini, Rossini, Verdi, Puccini, and early Wagner. A mid-career weight loss may have hastened her vocal decline and ended her performing years prematurely. The press feasted on her alleged rivalry with Tebaldi and her affair with Aristotle Onassis, whose wife divorced him over it - scandal always easier to sell than the artistry Leonard Bernstein called "the Bible of opera." She died in 1977; her ashes went into the Aegean two years later.