Highly rare thick pencil signature on a 3.5 x 5.5-inch lined notebook page, acquired in-person in the 1940s. In good condition. Trained as an opera singer in Geneva, Austria and Berlin, Katina Paxinou switched artistic gears when she joined the Greek National Theater at the age of 29, shining in classical Greek and English tragedies. During a U.S. tour of a production of Ibsen's Hedda Gabler, she was hand-selected to play Spanish freedom fighter Pilar in the 1943 film version of Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls, for which she nabbed an Academy Award. Afterwards, she was provided few roles worthy of her talents, but was particularly touching as the Italian matriarch in Luchino Visconti's masterpiece Rocco and His Brothers (1960). Paxinou is widely considered the greatest Greek actress of the 20th century.

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