Giorgos Kimoulis

Piraeus, 1977, and a company of his own

Kimoulis was born in Piraeus on 18 September 1956 and turned professional in 1977 with the collective Elefthero Theatro, part of the wave of group-led companies that reshaped Greek stages after the fall of the junta. He has worked since as an actor, a director and a translator of the texts he performs, and the three functions are rarely separated in his productions: the translation credit, the direction credit and the leading role tend to belong to the same person.

In 1986 he founded his own company, the Contemporary Theatre of Athens, and in 1996 he added a drama school to it. He has been a member of the Greek Actors' Union, where he served as vice-president, and of the Hellenic Theatre Society. The institutional side of his career extended beyond the profession: in October 2016 he was named to a government committee on constitutional reform, and on 28 February 2017 he was appointed president of the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Centre, a post he left on 16 March 2017, a little over a fortnight later. In 2019 he publicly backed the Greek Communist Party.

The repertoire that built the name

The spine of his work is classical and canonical. He has played Hamlet, Macbeth and Othello, and worked repeatedly through Sophocles, Euripides, Ibsen, Chekhov and Strindberg. Alongside the stage work runs a screen career that begins in the late 1970s and continues into the 2010s, with television across ERT, ANT1 and Mega, though the theatre has always been where the serious part of the output sits.

His own account of the work is unsentimental about entertainment. Speaking to Athinorama about Sophocles, he described theatre as another exercise in memory — a form whose job is to remind an audience of what it has let itself forget — and framed the point of a production as a continuing argument about what a better society might look like, rather than an evening out. He reads to prepare: Agamben, Foucault and Butler were the books in hand while he was building his Philoctetes.

Philoctetes on the summer circuit

The production that carried him through 2025 was Sophocles' Philoctetes, which he directed and in which he took the title role. It opened at the Veakio Theatre in Piraeus on 28 June 2025 and ran until 8 September, touring Greece and Cyprus: the Vrahos Theatre on 3 July, Patras on the 4th, the ancient theatre of Dodoni near Ioannina on the 6th, the Forest Theatre in Thessaloniki on the 8th, Papagou on the 10th and 11th, then Messolonghi, Petroupoli, Kalamata, the ancient theatre of Ilia, Chania, Rethymno, Heraklion, Lefkada, Arta, Lavrio and Chalkida before an August and September leg.

It was staged by the company Methexis, run by Christos Tripodis, in collaboration with the municipal theatre of Agrinio. Dimitris Gkotsopoulos and Thodoris Katsafados played opposite him, with a chorus of seven — Panagiotis Katsikis, Manolis Klonaris, Kostas Korakis, Theofilis Paschalidis, Vassilis Poulakas, Marios Tzogkanos and Giorgos Tsouronakis. Maria Filippou designed the set, Sofia Nikolaidi and Ilias Stringaris the costumes, Stella Kaltsou the lighting, Andreas Katsigiannis the music, and Kyriakos Kosmidis the movement.

Kimoulis reads the play as a confidence trick with moral consequences: Odysseus organises the deception, the young Neoptolemus is sent to carry it out, and the clash is between a pragmatism that treats ends as justifying means and an idealism that will not. He has argued that Sophocles came to regret the first position, and that it is the one still used to license violence. His daughter Marianna now also works on stage.

The accusations and the courtroom calendar

The other reason his name has stayed in the Greek press is legal. In January 2021, during the wave of allegations that followed the Greek #MeToo disclosures, the actress Zeta Douka said in an interview that she had been subjected to psychological, verbal and physical violence by Kimoulis during a stage collaboration; other complaints were submitted in writing to the Actors' Union. On 10 April 2022 union members voted to expel him permanently, along with two other actors. He has denied the allegations throughout.

On 11 July 2025 the Athens misdemeanours court convicted him of procuring false testimony, after a complaint by Douka: he had called a single witness, a theatre technician, and the court found both men had given false statements, with no mitigating circumstances allowed. The sentence was 20 months, suspended, plus a €3,000 fine. He was acquitted on a separate defamation count because of a change in the law.

The litigation has continued in both directions. On 23 June 2026 the actress Panagiota Vlanti was acquitted of criminal defamation over 2023 interviews in which she described abusive behaviour by Kimoulis; the prosecutor's view, which the court adopted, was that she had passed on claims she believed to be true and that the required intent was absent. On 1 October 2026 the hearing of his own €700,000 civil claim against Douka, Dora Chrysikou and Nikos Psarras was adjourned again at his request to 22 October, with the defendants' lawyer Giorgos Gerarlis saying outside court that the action had been split into two separate proceedings.

Red: Rothko at the Mousouri

The current work is John Logan's Red, which Kimoulis translated and directed and in which he plays Mark Rothko. It opened at the Theatro Mousouri on Karytsi Square in central Athens on Wednesday 7 October 2026, with Dimitris Gkotsopoulos — his Philoctetes co-star — as Ken, the young assistant. Manolis Pantelidakis designed the set, Sofia Nikolaidi the costumes and Stella Kaltsou the lighting; Mary Andreou is assistant director, and the production is mounted by Karolos Pavlakis's theatrical enterprises.

Logan's two-hander is set in Rothko's studio in the late 1950s, as the painter weighs the commission for the murals destined for a New York restaurant against his own account of what the work is for. Ken admires him and keeps asking the questions that undo him. The production's own framing is generational: the older artist hearing the next wave arrive, the younger one claiming space and the right to doubt, each generation experiencing succession as both an overthrow and a debt. The play had its premiere in London in 2009, transferred to Broadway in 2010 and took six Tony Awards including best play.

It is a continuation rather than a departure. Kimoulis has made the Mousouri something close to a home stage, where he also staged and starred in Stephen Belber's The Meeting with Katerina Theochari and Vasilis Giakoumaros, returning to it for successive seasons. A notice of that production singled out his central performance for not interpreting a role so much as becoming it, and credited the pared-back direction with leaving room for the text and the acting to work.