Thanasis Veggos

Veggos was born on 29 May 1927 in Neo Faliro, the working-class district of Piraeus by the old power station where his father worked. The family was poor and left-wing, and at the end of the Civil War the young Thanasis, then doing his military service, was sent to the prison island of Makronisos, where political suspects were held, from 1948 to 1950. There he met the film director Nikos Koundouros, also a prisoner, who after their release gave him work as an assistant on his first film, Μαγική πόλη (Magic City, 1954), and then a small part in Ο Δράκος (The Ogre, 1956).

Through the 1950s he played bit parts in Greek comedies, and by the early 1960s he was a star. He set up his own production company and made films at an exhausting pace, often several a year, doing his own stunts and famously running through every scene; the press called him «ο άνθρωπος που τρέχει», the man who runs. He married, had two sons, and lived modestly in Athens, avoiding the celebrity life.

After the collapse of the commercial Greek cinema in the late 1970s he worked less, until a new generation of directors rediscovered him as a serious actor in the 1990s. He died in Athens on 3 May 2011, a few weeks short of eighty-four, and his funeral brought out crowds of ordinary Athenians who had grown up with his films.

The Veggos character is always the same man: poor, honest, hopelessly energetic, pushed around by bosses, bureaucrats and crooks, and winning by sheer persistence. In Πολυτεχνίτης και ερημοσπίτης (Jack of All Trades, 1963, by Alekos Sakellarios) he goes from job to job and ruins each one. In Ένας τρελός τρελός Βέγγος (A Mad, Mad Veggos, 1965) and the Thou-Vou series, beginning with Θου-Βου Φαλακρός Πράκτωρ, Επιχείρησις: Γης Μαδιάμ (Thou-Vou, Bald Secret Agent, 1969), he parodies James Bond as the inept spy Thou-Vou, a name made from his own initials, Θ.Β.

Two films with the director Dinos Katsouridis showed what lay beneath the slapstick. In Τι έκανες στον πόλεμο, Θανάση; (What Did You Do in the War, Thanasis?, 1971) he is a simple man in occupied Athens who gets mistaken for a resistance hero, and the comedy keeps turning into a portrait of hunger and fear; it won him the best-actor award at the Thessaloniki Film Festival. Θανάση, πάρε τ' όπλο σου (Thanasis, Take Your Gun, 1972) is its companion piece about the war of 1940. Later came Ο Θανάσης στη χώρα της σφαλιάρας (Thanasis in the Land of the Slap, 1976) and Ο Θανάσης και το καταραμένο φίδι (Thanasis and the Cursed Snake, 1982).

In 1995 Theo Angelopoulos cast him as the taxi driver who carries Harvey Keitel through the snow to the Albanian border in Το βλέμμα του Οδυσσέα (Ulysses' Gaze), a quiet, melancholy part that surprised everyone, and he followed it with Pantelis Voulgaris' Όλα είναι δρόμος (It's All a Road, 1998) and the school caretaker of Το καναρινί ποδήλατο (The Canary-Yellow Bicycle, 1999).

Veggos' films are shown on Greek television constantly, and whole families still laugh at them together; Τι έκανες στον πόλεμο, Θανάση; is regularly voted among the best Greek films ever made. His catchphrase «Καλέ μου άνθρωπε» (my good man) is part of everyday Greek, said with his exact tone of weary kindness, and when someone rushes around frantically people say they are running «σαν τον Βέγγο», like Veggos. For a learner, watching the Thou-Vou spoofs or the Katsouridis films is one of the most pleasant ways to hear fast, colloquial Athenian Greek. In Neo Faliro, where he was born, and across Piraeus his name is remembered with affection, and the phrase «ο άνθρωπος που τρέχει» still means him and nobody else.

• Thou-Vou, the name of his bald secret agent, is simply his initials, Θ.Β., spelled out as they are pronounced.
• He was held on the prison island of Makronisos from 1948 to 1950, and it was there that he met the director Nikos Koundouros, who started him in films.
• He did his own stunts and ran so much on screen that «the man who runs» became his nickname.
• Theo Angelopoulos, the most austere of Greek directors, gave him one of his finest roles at sixty-eight, as the taxi driver in Ulysses' Gaze (1995).