Background
Foskolos was born in Athens on 26 November 1927.
Foskolos was born in Athens on 26 November 1927.
He studied Political Science at the University of Athens but did not graduate.
He is one of the most commercially successful screenwriters of Greek cinema. He has been called the "Goldfinger of commercial shows". He has been described as "the maître of exaggeration" and "the king of television shows".
His film Ipolochagos Natassa kept the most commercially successful film record for almost three decades from 1970 to 1999.
From the age of 17, he started writing successful radio plays with both a historical and modern background. His radio series Police Stories were the most popular radio series for three years.
In the 1960s, he worked as a theatre critic and also wrote plays for the theatre and radio. He wrote screenplays for over 70 Greek films, mostly working for Finos Film.
He introduced spaghetti westerns to Greek cinema.
Lampsi was shown for 13 years from 1991 to 2005 with a total of 3457 episodes produced. In the 1970s, his television serial Agnostos Polemos (Unknown War) broke the record of television ratings with 92% of Greek households tuning in to the show. Foskolos has been described as an "important screenwriter", a "talented director", a "wonderful human being" and "the father of television-serials and films".
Ta Nea refers to him as "hyperproductive".
The same paper also calls him polygrafotatos translating as "the one who has authored many writings". In a 1999 interview to the Vima newspaper, Foskolos said that he wonders if the political reality in Greece has surpassed even his own screenplays and said that he thinks that Greek society has "fallen into a vertical aquarium of corruption".
He said than in one scene of his film Koinonia, Ora Miden (Society, Hour Zero) a corrupt politician offers millions to Nikos Kourkoulos, who was playing the role of the honest hero of the film, to buy his silence for a crime committed by his cohorts. The politician told the hero that the price they had to pay was selling their conscience for their livelihood.
Foskolos then remarked that the story he wrote for the film turned out to be prescient in the years that followed.