After seven years in exile from her native Greece, Actress-Activist Melina Mercouri has come home swinging. Mercouri, 49, has announced her candidacy for Parliament from Piraeus, which includes the red-light region that the kinetic star made famous in her 1960 film Never On Sunday. Though she may find the district's voters to be tough customers, thanks to the popularity of the local Communist Party, Mercouri, a Socialist, is confident that she will be taken seriously. "There is no pretending, no act," she says of her new campaign. "There's a bit of the actor in all Greeks, and they will be able to tell straightaway whether you're genuine or not."

"After 25 years, you are not what you were," reflected Diva Maria Callas last week. Though critics have been telling the volatile prima donna something like that for years, the Callas star quality still blazes in Japan where she and Tenor Giuseppe di Stefano have drawn sellout audiences and 40-minute curtain calls during their concert tour. Pausing in her $330-a-day Tokyo hotel suite, where the air-conditioning ducts were sealed to protect the famous Callas cords, the star spoke of her on-again, off-again career. "At a certain point in my life I had wanted to dominate my voice," she explained. "It was not enough that I should open my mouth to sing. That's where I got into trouble." Her troubles are apparently over—at least for the moment. Callas vowed to repay Japanese hospitality by returning to Tokyo next fall in Tosca, her first full-length opera appearance since bowing out of New York's Metropolitan Opera nearly a decade ago.

Ex-Beatle John Lennon, 34, who has had his gruff periods, was in silly high spirits last week during recording sessions in Manhattan. "Hello, this is President Ford," he announced when the phone rang, "and I just want to say I never took a dime." Honest John is in the midst of a fight against deportation. "I don't know what will happen," said the man who is becoming one of America's longest-playing imports. "People read in the paper that I've got 30 days left, and then they see me and say, 'Why, are you still here?' I guess my lawyer keeps appealing, and it keeps going on and on." While the singer-songwriter was taping his newest album, more than a score of old John Lennon-Paul McCartney songs were being dusted off for a Nov. 14 debut as a rock musical, Sgt. Pepper Lonely Hearts Club Band on the Road. Lennon dropped by during the show's rehearsals in New York. "I enjoyed the music," he observed thoughtfully. "You find yourself singing along."