Tony Palmer’s video biography of Callas was made in VHS form a couple of years after her death. It now appears digitally remastered to excellent effect. Palmer managed to interview practically everyone who had played an important (and even unimportant) part in her life from her earliest times in Greece until her sad demise in Paris in 1977.

There is plenty of film of her talking or arguing with reporters and others, and you always feel the anger in the background at the invasion of her privacy. Yet she inevitably courted controversy because of her unique status as an opera star. The more rewarding views and interviews with her concern her secretary, Lord Harewood, Zeffirelli, and of course her first husband Meneghini, who was her Svengali in the early and most productive period of her life. Then when she met Onassis, her first and only true love, singing suddenly seemed to take a back seat and in the succeeding years she never quite regained her former glory as one of the most exciting and original singers ever to appear before the public.

As ever, Palmer is adroit at linking the various strands of her life together into a fascinating biography but he also displays the faults in his other musical films of too often allowing speech to interrupt Callas’s appearance as a singer in opera and concert, so that, infuriatingly, arias are chopped up into irrelevant soundbites. Still, there is enough here of her wonderful Bellini, Donizetti, Verdi and Puccini to inform any newcomer what a truly unique artist she was. Her end remains infinitely sad as she fades away almost alone in her Paris apartment.