Over the span of her career, she has released over 200 albums in at least thirteen languages, including Greek, French, English, German, Dutch, Portuguese, Italian, Japanese, Spanish, Hebrew, Welsh, Mandarin Chinese and Corsican.

Her friendship with the composer Michel Legrand led to the recording by Mouskouri of the theme song of the Oscar-nominated film The Umbrellas of Cherbourg.

Her popularity as a multilingual television personality and distinctive image, owing to the then unusual signature black-rimmed glasses, turned Mouskouri into an international star.

"Je chante avec toi Liberté", recorded in 1981, is perhaps her biggest hit to date, performed in at least five languages[3] – French,[4] English as "Song for Liberty",[5] German as "Lied der Freiheit",[6] Spanish as "Libertad"[7] and Portuguese as "Liberdade".

As a child, she listened to radio broadcasts of singers including Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Judy Garland, Charles Trenet, Billie Holiday, and Édith Piaf.

[20] During an episode of Joanna Lumley's Greek Odyssey, shown on the UK ITV channel in the autumn of 2011, Mouskouri told the actress Joanna Lumley how she had been scheduled to sing at the amphitheatre at Epidauros with other students of the Conservatoire, when upon arrival at the amphitheatre word came through from the Conservatoire in Athens that she had just been barred from participating in the performance there owing to her involvement in light music.

In 1959 Mouskouri performed Hadjidakis' "Κάπου υπάρχει η αγάπη μου" (Kápou ipárchi i agápi mou, "Somewhere my love exists"; co-written with poet Nikos Gatsos) at the inaugural Greek Song Festival.

Mouskouri performed Kostas Yannidis' composition, "Ξύπνα αγάπη μου" (Xýpna agápi mou, "Wake up, my love"), at the Mediterranean Song Festival, held in Barcelona that year.

[22] Not long after that, she started a relationship with her record producer André Chapelle;[citation needed] however, they did not marry then because she "didn't want to bring another man into the family" and divorce was against her conservative upbringing.

In 1962, she met Quincy Jones, who persuaded her to travel to New York City to record an album of American jazz titled The Girl from Greece Sings.

While on the show Mouskouri performed "Telalima" followed by "Σήκω χόρεψε κουκλί μου" (Siko horepse koukli mou) accompanied by Harry Belafonte and Danny Kaye.

Mouskouri made her first appearance at Paris' legendary Olympia concert theatre the same year, singing French pop, Greek folk, and Hadjidakis numbers.

These successes across Europe and elsewhere impressed Yvonne Littlewood, the BBC producer who had first met Mouskouri at the 1963 Eurovision Song Contest in London.

A typical episode of her series contained contemporary British, American and French pop and folk music, popular classical pieces, and the Greek songs which had originally made her famous.

Despite the fact that stars from mainland Europe singing in languages other than English have tended to find it difficult to break into the British market, the series proved very popular with viewers of the new BBC-2 channel, and it ran until 1976.

These introductions, along with a modest stage presence and her bespectacled appearance, made her a very distinctive star, as Yvonne Littlewood later explained: Mouskouri's international appeal encouraged the BBC to sell her programmes to television stations across the world, a fact which she acknowledged in a BBC interview in 2014: Mouskouri also hosted her own shows for French and West German broadcasters during this period.

At a time when TV programmes could attract huge audiences, her popularity as a multilingual television personality turned her into a truly international star.

[27] This began a series of albums for the UK market which, boosted by her TV appearances, sold extremely well during the early 1970s, including The exquisite Nana Mouskouri (1969), Turn on the sun (1970), A place in my heart (1971) and Presenting Nana Mouskouri - Songs from her TV series (1973), while concerts from two of her British tours were also recorded and released as LPs: British Concert (1972) and Live at the Albert Hall (1974).

Meanwhile, Passport, a compilation including her most popular songs in English, reached number 3 in the UK album charts in 1976 and won for her a gold disc.

[28] As her fame began spreading outside her fan base in Europe, the United States, and the Commonwealth, Mouskouri was asked to record songs for the Japanese and Taiwanese markets.

It was well received in Canada, and one of the album's tracks, "Even Now" (not the same song as the 1978 Barry Manilow hit), became a staple on beautiful music radio stations in the United States.

In 1985, Mouskouri recorded "Only Love", the theme song to the American TV series Mistral's Daughter – based upon the novel by Judith Krantz – which reached number 2 in the UK charts.

The song was also a hit in its other versions: L'Amour en héritage (French), Come un'eredità (Italian), La dicha del amor (Spanish), and Aber die Liebe bleibt (German).

The German version was also recorded with an alternate set of lyrics under the title Der wilde Wein; it was withdrawn in favour of Aber die Liebe bleibt.

By the end of 1987, she had performed a series of concerts in Asia, including South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong, Malaysia and Thailand.

Produced by Michel Legrand it was a collection of famous songs from films, and served not only as a tribute to the world of cinema, but also as a personal reference to childhood memories of sitting with her father in his projection room in Crete.

[29] She recorded several more albums in 1996 and 1997, including the Spanish Nana Latina (which featured duets with Julio Iglesias and Mercedes Sosa), the English-language Return to Love, and the French pop classics, Hommages.

From 2005 until 2008, she conducted a farewell concert tour of Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Asia, South America, the United States, and Canada.

[37] Despite her 'farewell tour' and 'final concert', she continues to make occasional appearances on TV shows, especially in Germany, though increasingly using 'le playback' (miming), which, unlike many other singers, she rarely used through most of her career; the most recent at time of writing was the 2023-12-2 German (ARD1) 'Das Adventsfest der 100 000 Lichter' (advent celebration of 100,000 lights - coincidentally the show's title partially reflecting one of her early [1965] German hits[38]), in which she duetted one song[39] and participated in the finale.

[55] The single "White Roses from Athens” was released in 1961, which stayed at number 1 on the charts for 39 weeks and sold more than 1.5 million copies within six months.