This week, the life of 1950s opera icon Maria Callas comes to Australian cinema screens, with Angelina Jolie playing the title role.
Biopics, documentaries, films and TV series about classical musicians have been a firm fixture in recent years, making a splash in award ceremonies and film festivals.
There's Bradley Cooper's Maestro, which focuses on the relationship between American composer Leonard Bernstein and his wife Felicia Montealegre.
Also popular is Cate Blanchett's mesmerising performance as fictional world-famous conductor Lydia Tár. It's a prestigious role which is rarely held by women in real life.
Many more actors from Meryl Streep to Kelvin Harrison Jr have starred in adaptations focused on the lives of classical musicians.
What is it about the inner world of classical music that is so appealing, and what does it take for actors to bring such specialised roles to life?
What makes classical music such an interesting subject on screen?
There are endless on-stage and on-screen portrayals of the classical music world and the famous composers, conductors and performers who inhabit it.
But you don't have to be an aficionado to enjoy these stories. Many of the figures being covered are popular names you might recognise regardless of your music taste.
"Some of the more famous figures like Bernstein or Mozart are really figures in popular culture in the broadest possible sense," says ABC Classic's Screen Sounds presenter Dan Golding.
"But there are also figures that average film-goers might not know a lot about," he says.
Their stories tap into major world events, or common human experiences, so there's strong connections for audiences, regardless of personal interests.
One example Golding cites is J. Robert Oppenheimer, an American theoretical physicist who was instrumental in the development of World War II's atomic bombs. The biopic based on his life dominated the Oscars last year.
Competing against Oppenheimer at the award ceremonies was Maestro, Bradley Cooper's film about legendary conductor Leonard Bernstein, in which Cooper both directed, and played the title role.
Screen stories of the classical music world tend to lean more into the drama and theatre of the famous figures, and how their musical composition or performances literally sound-tracked their lives.
Amadeus, a 1984 movie based on a play of the same name, shows how this plays out. The plot revolves around 18th-century composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and his lesser-known rival Antonio Salieri, with soundtracks featuring Mozart's famous musical pieces.
While the film took a lot of creative license with historical facts, the supposed rivalry between the two composers is what sticks in the mind of many audiences.
"The movie was just unbelievably successful and still stands up today," Golding says.
A TV series remake of Amadeus, starring Will Sharpe and Paul Bettany is due to be released later in 2025.
In Maria, the personal tragedy of Callas's life also takes centre stage. As a 1950s opera icon, Callas's life has been almost as dramatic as the roles she played.
Callas had a difficult childhood, a fraught professional life and a relationship with one of the world's richest magnates, Aristotle Onassis.
She was never far from the headlines.
Callas imbued tragic heroines of opera with raw emotion unsurpassed by many other performers, only to lose her voice at the height of her career.
During Callas's retirement, Onassis left her to marry Jacqueline Kennedy, the former first lady of the United States.
What does it take for an actor to portray a world-class musician?
Being able to convincingly portray a musician on screen is no small feat for an actor. Most professional musicians hone their skills over a lifetime, often starting their musical journeys as children.
Jolie trained for seven months for her role as Callas, taking singing lessons as well as classes in Italian, opera, and breathing.
"You can't fake-sing opera," Jolie says. "It comes from everything you've got. Not just the sound, the technical [sic] but also the emotion."
Although he had some classical training, Cooper still spent hundreds of hours practising conducting before he stepped onto the podium as Bernstein.
"In musical biopics, there's a real sense that this is a performance, with capital letters, from the actors," Golding says.
For figures like Callas and Bernstein, where there are countless hours of interview and performance footage, actors have a lot of reference material to base their performances on. Sometimes their portrayals can be uncanny in their likeness.
Sydney-based cabaret singer Melody Beck created a stage show based on the story of singer Marni Nixon, who was the voice behind many of Hollywood's Golden Era stars, from Natalie Wood in Westside Story to Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady.
To prepare for her role as Nixon, Beck read and watched everything she could about Nixon, as well as the actors Nixon worked with.
She even met Nixon in person.
"I got to go to New York and I did the show for [Nixon] when she was alive," Beck shares. "She said it was quite audacious, but she loved it."
Part of the challenge of portraying Nixon was the fact that she spent most of her time stepping in for other actors.
In a process known as dubbing, Nixon recreated how these actors moved, spoke and sung in order to make those recordings seem seamless.
In turn, Beck says: "I had to be Marni, who was being somebody else, who was being a character."
Nowadays, actors are expected to be much more involved in the musical aspects of their roles. In Maria, Jolie's voice is mixed with recordings of Callas's performances.
"You always listen to Angelina and you always listen to Maria Callas," the film's director, Pablo Larraín, told Vanity Fair.
"When we listen to Maria Callas in her prime, most of the sound is Callas—90 percent, 95 percent—and when we listen to Callas older and in the present, almost all of it is Angelina."
Golding finds genuine "on-camera" performances from actors most rewarding to watch.
"Whenever an actor gives that level of commitment in their role, it does something to the audience even when they're not familiar with that world," Golding says.
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