Who loves ya, baby:
Ariana Savalas,
Telly’s youngest daughter, romancing her past and present



Ariana Savalas is nothing like her father, Telly, the movie star and the icon of the 1970s television hit, Kojak.

By Dimitri C. Michalakis

He was a late bloomer who only started acting well into his thirties and crooning well after that. Ariana is only 23 and has already starred in two films (in one playing an aging Holocaust survivor), toured Europe as a teenage musical sensation, studied Shakespeare and acting at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts in London, guest-starred on CBS’ Criminal Minds, and is now recording an album of standards and original songs—all by 23!

“I’m under the impression that life is about throwing yourself anywhere you possibly can and whatever sticks is what you’re supposed to do,” she says from her home in LA, where she grew up and claims she is surrounded by about “30,000 members” of the Savalas clan (“We’re really the type of people where if you date one of us, you date all of us”).

Her career arc is very much like her father’s, who had multiple stints as a radio host, theater company director, and television producer (he gave Howard Cosell his first job) before venturing before the cameras and launching himself into acting, and later, singing.

“Exactly,” says Ariana. “I always thought there was something wrong with me, because I was never one of those people that had one direction. I was always grasping at anything that I thought would be really amazing, and 99% of the time it was either music or acting. But then my dad worked as a lifeguard, had a radio show, owned a theater company, he did everything.”

Her father died when she was only seven, but she says, “I had seven years to remember what an amazing guy he was and why everybody loved him so much. And my father was constantly busy, but we were always with him. Places where kids were never allowed, restaurants where kids were never allowed, clubs and casinos, my dad did not care at all. He brought us everywhere. He always wanted us with him. He was the kind of guy that would never say no and always had a smile on his face.”

He also hated houses, so Ariana and her brother Christian (from Telly’s third wife Julie Hovland) grew up at the Sheraton Universal Hotel in Universal City. “We literally lived in a hotel for six years,” she says. “We had an apartment there, and the bartenders and the people who played the piano were our friends. We used to hang out and run around the halls and just be crazy, and we didn’t think anything different existed.”

After her dad died, her mother took them back to her native Minnesota. But “nothing happens in Minnesota,” so they moved back to LA and Ariana went to school there surrounded by the “30,000 members” of the Savalas clan who had mostly settled in LA after moving out from their native Garden City in New York (their own parents had immigrated from Yeraka in Sparta, and only Telly’s brother Teddy still remains in New York; Gus moved to LA, and George, the “Stavros” of Kojak legend, died on the west coast in 1985 from leukemia).

“My family was around every single day,” Ariana remembers. “We would have pancakes at two in the morning, and my cousins would come over, and George’s kids would come over, and we’d always have everybody around all the time. The kind of person my dad was, he wasn’t a very private person. He liked to be surrounded by people.”

And he liked to be surrounded by romance and drama and music. “I grew up in a very romantic, artistic family,” she says (her mother is an artist and inventor). “I grew up in a family of hopeless romantics, and passion, and drama, and crazy fun just surrounded me every single day. There’s not one boring person in the Savalas family and it makes for a very, very wonderful, interesting holiday. On my mom’s side of the family, too, everybody is just so great.”

They sang all the time, too, and the kids put on shows for the family (“We used to have these little parties and do skits and songs for everybody and dress up in little suits and dresses”) and Ariana got addicted to Disney musicals, among others, so during a vacation to Austria when a friend dared her to record a CD at a mobile karaoke machine, she readily took up the challenge.

“And I went in there and recorded just some stupid track and got my CD and came out. And the person who was running it was on the phone and looking at me and having this weird grin on her face, and I didn’t really know what that was about, but they had my information, because you to fill out something, and somehow they tracked me down and found out the hotel I was staying at, and called me, and asked me if they would be able to submit me to a contest.”
She agreed and they uploaded her track on the Internet and by popular vote she was invited to perform at a concert in Austria, where she won third prize. A record producer was in the audience and offered her a contract and she recorded her first single and was offered her first recording contract at 16. “I was a sophomore in high school, barely into high school,” she remembers, barely seven years later. “And I had no idea what I was doing. It was a pretty amazing time in my life.”

She performed in Europe (but did come back to finish high school), and between her junior and senior years she squeezed in some acting and Shakespeare studies at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts in London. And then in the typical whirlwind of her career, she was just a month in LA and after going to her first audition, she landed her first movie gig at 18 in the film Miriam— the true story of Miriam Shafer, a Holocaust survivor, in a harrowing role that required the young actress to age from 15 to 50.

“This happened literally a month after I moved out to LA and I didn’t even have time to be nervous,” she admits. “It was obviously something I needed to do and I did it.”

She landed a second movie role shortly afterwards in the film Akrasia by Polish director Xavier Tatarkiewicz and guest-starred on television, but then true to the Savalas’ tradition, while pursuing her acting she also began to develop her music (she’s also studied piano and dance).

Just recently she performed from her bible, “the Great American Songbook,” at Davenport’s in Chicago (“I’m a very old soul, a lot of people have told me; I was born in the wrong decade”) and she will be performing this month at New York’s Greek Independence Day Parade and later at her father’s old golf tournament in Scottsdale, Arizona, the Hellenic Golf Classic.

“It will be preparing to speak a lot of Greek,” she laughs. “I always tell people I’m a Greek shower speaker and singer—which means, I only speak Greek in the shower, like people only sing in the shower. This is exciting for me and absolutely horrifying—“she laughs again “—being surrounded by so many Greeks who are probably critiquing my diction and my accent—it’s gonna be interesting. But it should be fun.”

She will be recording her first album of standards and original songs by this summer and she might even record some Greek songs down the road.

“I love singing Greek,” she says. “Being Greek is something that I’m so proud of and I want to make our people proud and do right by my heritage. So I will most certainly be including Greek music into my repertoire much more—songs like Agape Me and Se’ Agapo—they’re really timeless music. Even if you don’t speak a lick of Greek you still understand how beautiful they are.”

All in her father’s tradition of romancing many genres and styles.

“He was beyond amazing,” she says. “You could always tell that he loved what he did. It was never a chore.”

©2010 NEOCORP MEDIA

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