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Olympia Dukakis, the Oscar-winning actor whose blockbuster films included Moonstruck and Steel Magnolias, has passed away. She was 89 years old.
Dukakis’ brother Apollo Dukakis broke the news on Facebook on Saturday, writing that “after several months of failing health” his “beloved sister Olympia Dukakis passed away this morning in New York”.
Dukakis won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor for Moonstruck, a 1987 romantic comedy in which she played the mother of the main character played by Cher alongside Nicolas Cage. Other films included Look Who’s Talking and its sequel, Working Girl and Mr Holland’s Opus.
Over the course of a long television career, Dukakis appeared as transgender owner Anna Madrigal from San Francisco in a series based on the city tales of Armistead Maupin. She also appeared in the stoner comedy Bored to Death, in which her character had an affair with the character played by Zach Galifianakis.
“I always played older,” she told the New York Times in 2004. “I think it was the vocals.”
Among Saturday’s tributes, Cher tweeted: “Olympia Dukakis was an incredible Oscar-winning actress. Olympia played my mother in Moonstruck and even though her role was that of a suffering woman… all the time she told me how much she loved Louis, her “beautiful talented husband”. I spoke to him three weeks ago. Tear up my dear. “
Star Trek actor George Takei wrote: “We were struck by the moon, as she told us great tales of the city. A true Steel Magnolia in a more common forest. Ah, what a life force, his last years are the best. Rest now among the heavens, Olympia.
Dukakis had a long career on stage and married Louis Zorich, also an actor, in 1962. They had three children.
They appeared together once, in a production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf by Edward Albee for the theater company they founded in Montclair, New Jersey in 1979. On Zorich’s death in 2018, at the age of The 93-year-old Times cited a 1991 interview in which it said the couple got so into their warring couple roles that they “almost got a divorce.”
On Saturday, Apollo Dukakis wrote that his sister was “at last at peace and with her Louis”.
Born in Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1931, Olympia Dukakis was a cousin of Michael Dukakis, a governor of Massachusetts who was the Democratic presidential candidate in 1988. Collecting her Oscar that year, she held the award above her. head and called, “OK, Michael, let’s go! Both called 88 “the year of the Dukakii”, but he lost definitively to Republican George HW Bush.
In 2012, Dukakis told The Guardian that she believed her Greek ancestry meant that she “was a foreigner and that I never quite fitted in – both when it came to Greek culture and American culture. traditional. Growing up, I was always a little torn between these two worlds, never respectful enough of one or the other. But it is okay.”
In an in-depth interview in 2001, she told the same newspaper that growing up, “we fought the Armenians, we fought the Irish, we fought the French, they fought us. We were only eight or nine years old and our names were greaseball, Mick, wop and so on. And of course, we didn’t care about everyone’s names.
Describing Zorich’s imminent death in a car crash in 1977, she said: “The cast knew what had happened and they would call me up and give me two or three days at the movies. People were very nice because they knew we were [struggling]. I remember thinking, “This is too hard. I want to stop, I just want to stop. ”
But the comedy turned out to be too appealing – and “the only thing I could make a living from.”
“The process is endlessly interesting,” said Dukakis. “How you change as you work and get older. You sort of get to know more about who you are, what you are and why you are. “
Success, she said, was sometimes difficult to manage.
“I struggled with that. People said to me, “Oh, you paid your dues”. But a lot of people too. And what about all those amazing pieces I was in? Fussing about the Oscar sounded like betrayal.
“Finally, it occurred to me: maybe good fortune comes to you for the same reason as bad. It’s about understanding better: you learn a lot of things when you have a hard time, and other things when you are what the world calls success. Or maybe it’s just something happening. Some days it’s cold and some days it’s hot.
In the 2012 interview, Dukakis touched on his status as a gay icon, thanks to the role of Anna Madrigal.
“I appreciate that my work is seen and understood and that it is relevant to people,” she said. “And I’m lucky to have friends of all sexual tendencies, some of which I can’t explain. So everything is fine.
“Last year I was Grand Marshal at the San Francisco Gay Parade, and that was good too. You can walk around in a car and say hello to people – that’s about it. My arm got so tired from the restlessness that my brother had to hold it up for me.
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