Nia Vardalos is a Hollywood actress and screenwriter with Greek roots and 2003 Academy Award nominee. Most of all, she is known to the audience as the leading role in the movie "My Big Greek Wedding".
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Nia Vardalos was born in Winnipeg (Canada) in 1962 to a Greek family. She managed to achieve her first significant success in the stand-up genre - for some time the girl performed with her humorous monologues in Toronto.
In 1993, Nia married the American film actor Ian Gomez (it is interesting that before the wedding, at the insistence of Nia, he converted to Orthodoxy) and moved to the United States. Since the mid-nineties, Vardalos began acting in American TV series. However, at first, she was not invited to major roles, and she had to play only in small episodes.
Success of "My Big Greek Wedding"
Nia Vardalos's career took on a new level after she created and staged her autobiographical play My Big Greek Wedding. Moreover, in this play she played completely alone - all ten roles. The production of Vardalos was not very popular with the audience, but the producer Rita Wilson noticed it and decided to make a film adaptation - this is how the film "My Big Greek Wedding" appeared.
This film was released in 2002 and made Nia (she played the main character here - Fortula Portocalos) famous. The box office for "My Big Greek Wedding" was fantastic: the film grossed $ 368 million in theaters around the world and recouped its budget by more than 6,000 percent (in fact, this is the most commercially profitable romantic comedy ever!).
Thanks to this film, Vardalos was nominated for an Oscar in the category "Best Original Screenplay" in 2003, as well as for a Golden Globe in the category "Best Actress". However, she still did not receive any of the awards.
Further life and work of Nia Vardalos
In 2004, according to the script by Vardalos, the comedy "There are only girls in the show" was filmed. Nia herself played one of the main characters in it. This tape, despite the fact that Tom Hanks was among its producers, failed at the box office.
After that, the Greek actress did not appear in Hollywood films for almost five years. Just during this period (more specifically, in 2008), after numerous attempts to conceive a child from her husband using IVF, she adopted a girl, Ilaria. About this event, Vardalos later wrote the book "Mom overnight".
In 2009, Nia returned to the screens as a leading role in the film "My Big Greek Summer". This film was better received by critics and the general public than "The Show Only Girls." In addition, he greatly contributed to the popularization of Greek landmarks (for example, the Acropolis) in the United States.
The next major work by Nia Vardalos is the comedy film I Hate Valentine's Day (2009). It is interesting that here she showed herself not only as an actress and screenwriter, but also as a stage director.
In the current decade, Nia also took part in the creation of several Hollywood films - she wrote the script for the melodrama "Larry Crown", and in 2016 - the script for the long-awaited sequel to the 2002 movie "My Big Greek Wedding 2". In this tape (which, by the way, also received very decent fees in the US and in the world), Nia returned to the image of Fortula Portocalos, which she knew well.
In the summer of 2018, Nia Vardalos began divorce proceedings from Ian Gomez. The reason for the divorce, as indicated in the court documents, was "irreconcilable differences."
