To be the double of a Greek movie star at the peak of her career, at the moment when she is considered the most popular and most successful actress of Greek cinema, is not a small thing. Even more so, what better compliment could a woman in 1960s Athens get, than to be told they were more beautiful than Aliki Vougiouklaki herself. These are, in a nut shell, the memories of Mitsi Carras.

For the now 73-year-old Mitsi Carras, nee Kapetanopoulou, of the Gold Coast, taking part in the 1960 Miss Hellas contest changed her world upside down. As a first runner up, out of 450 girls that took part in the competition, the name Mitsi Kapetanopoulou was in the headlines of Greek newspapers.

For being the second most beautiful Greek woman in the competition, Mitsi was awarded with a two-year English course, a two-year cinema and theatre experience, and a trip to Rome with the Greek national Olympic Games team that year.

Soon after, she would become a news item in Apogeumatini again, when she decided to leave it all for a good-looking Greek Australian, 11 years her older, Yiannis Carras, who with no hesitation asked for Mitsi’s hand from her strict father.

“My father liked Yiannis, but he wanted me to fulfil the obligations that I had as Miss Hellas’ runner up for one year. But Yiannis didn’t want to wait,” Mitsi tells Neos Kosmos.

Attractive awards and opportunities, part of her prize, were let go, as from March 1961 twenty-year-old Mitsi called Australia home. She exchanged her father’s famous kafeneio Mpoufes Express, in Glifada, for Yiannis’ business in Queensland.

Today, Yiannis remembers he first ‘met’ Mitsi through the photos published in Kathimerini, that was selling in Sydney then. He was mesmerised.

“Once I went to Athens and accepted her uncle’s invitation to visit the famous Mpoufes Express, it was love at first sight,” Yiannis says today.

Mitsi and Yiannis got married in February 1961. In the Athens of 1961, this was a news item. On Friday 17 March, the newspaper Apogeumatini wrote: “Mitsi settled on the Fifth continent – where the Greek element is blossoming – to pursue happiness, which began last year when she was selected runner up in Miss Hellas.”

In 1965, circumstances were such that the couple, along with their two children, returned to Greece. Mitsi was already in Athens with two children, waiting for Yiannis to follow her from Australia, when she came upon a WELLA classified ad in the newspaper. With experience in modelling since the days of Miss Hellas, she got the job as a hair model for WELLA’s products in fashion shows.

And with her curved, perfectly shaped body, it didn’t take long for offers for catwalks to start coming Mitsi’s way. It was in one of the fashion parades that beautiful Mitsi caught the eye of the national movie star, Aliki Vougiouklaki.

“I never expected something like that. I worked hard – it wasn’t the easiest thing in the world to have two children, a husband and to respond to modelling responsibilities and our daily schedules,” Mitsi tells Neos Kosmos.

“Aliki’s manager approached me, I remember. She wanted to see me. She had just had her first and only son, Yiannis, had put some weight on and had two movies in front of her to be filmed.”

The first movie Mitsi did as an Aliki Vougiouklaki double for long and difficult shots, The Fairy and the Man (1969), was shot in studio in Athens and in Iraklio, Crete. For the whole crew, with Vougiouklaki and Mitsi as her double leading, the public attention they received was constantly on high.
Once, during the filming of the movie A Teacher with Blonde Hair in Volos, a journalist wrote an article in a local paper that was magnifying the beauty of Aliki’s double – who was “prettier than Aliki herself”, it read.

But modest Mitsi today says that fame and celebrity were never something she had dreamed about.

“I already had a name in Greece, after the Beauty Pageant competition; I wasn’t chasing my career. At that point I was a mother and a wife. For me, it was just a simple job,” she says.

“When I first met Aliki, she was checking my legs, my hair. She was a wise young woman, five years my elder.”
Once the star of Greek cinema was back in shape, there was no need for a double. Mitsi would have eventually lost her job, but the bond between the two beauties made Aliki keep her in different positions during the filming.

“She was the Brigitte Bardot of Greece. Our cooperation stopped in 1970, when I returned to Australia. She cried when I left.”

To work alongside and to be a double of the biggest national movie star was, for Mitsi, a unique life experience.

“We had a great bond. She loved me and she appreciated what I was doing. She was generous and very good with each crew member. The same goes for Dimitris Papamichael. We had some great times in Crete. My ​​husband and our kids were with me, so it was a combination of work and holiday,” Mitsi remembers.

“You know, if we had stayed in Greece, I would have continued to work with Finos Films. It was a well paid job I was happy with. It was the time we today call ‘the golden age of Greek cinema’,” she adds with nostalgia.

Due to the distance and decades that separated them, the bond between the two Athenian beauties faded away.
In the mid ’90s, Aliki Vougiouklaki visited Australia. During her visit to Brisbane, there was no need for further explanations and introductions when Mitsi Carras approached her – you can’t fail to recognize your own double.

It was the last time Mitsi Carras would see her sister in beauty.

Friendship and youth were gone a long time ago, and the Greek Brigitte Bardot passed away in 1996. However, in Mitsi’s memory, the year 1969, and the filming of movies with the biggest name of Greek cinematography, seem to be as vivid as in the days it happened.