Harikleia Roupaka (born 27 December 1950, Thebes), known artistically as Haris Alexiou, is a Greek singer, one of the most important singers in Greek singing, and the first female singer in terms of record sales in the history of Greek singing.
She is one of the most popular Greek female singers and has been at the forefront of Greek singing since the 1970s. She has collaborated with almost all the great singers, composers, and songwriters, past and present, either on record or on stages, dance floors, and concerts. He has performed in the world’s top venues and has been honored with major awards.
He has recorded over 30 personal albums. Although she does not usually refer to her album sales, according to a survey by Petros Dragumanos (2009), Harris Alexiou is in first place among female singers and third overall behind George Dalaras and Yannis Parios in the ranking with the most sales of personal albums that have gone gold or platinum from 1970 to 2009. According to the same source, eight of her personal albums have exceeded 11,000,000 sales, making her the only female singer to have achieved this in the Greek recording industry. The fact that the aforementioned personal albums are characterized by different musical styles (folk, rebetika, old, modern and artful folk, ballads), contain songs by various composers, and have been released between almost constant intervals from 1977 to 2003 proves, on the one hand, the undeniable contribution of Alexiou to the musical life of the country and on the other hand her continuous and uninterrupted contact with the people throughout these years. Her acceptance by her colleagues in the field of Greek singing is also universal.
In June 2020, she declared that she was stopping live performances after fifty years of presence in Greek singing because her voice no longer sounds good to her and she does not accept to sing if she does not do it well. In the same interview, she states that she has recorded a farewell song, a duet with the great Yasmin Levy. The song This Shadow is released in July by Minos Emi.
After announcing her retirement from singing and live performances, she turned to theatre, as she had already done in 2016 with the show Manuscript and in 2017 with Operetta. Thus, in October 2020, she stars in the monologue Metamfies by Vangelis Hatzigiannidis, directed by Stavros Ragia at the Mikro Pallas Theatre. She continues her theatrical career and in the summer of 2021, she appears in the performance Iphigenia en Taurois, directed by George Nanouris, as the goddess Athena, touring throughout Greece. At the same time, her participation in the new television series Maestro in Blue by Christoforos Papakaliatis, filmed in Paxos and Athens, is announced. The series is a great television success and becomes the first Greek series to enter the Netflix platform.
In September, on the occasion of the centenary of the Asia Minor catastrophe, he co-starred with actress Olia Lazaridou in Fotis Kontoglou’s performance “Aivali, my homeland” at the Municipal Theatre of Piraeus.
In February 2023 he releases a duet with Alkisti Protopsaltis “How to love” with lyrics by Nikos Moraitis and music by Nikos Antypas. It is the first time he meets with Alkisti Protopsaltis on record. The song was one of the last songs written by Antipas.
