Olympia Dukakis

Olympia Dukakis (June 20, 1931 – May 1, 2021) was an American actress. She performed in more than 130 stage productions, in some 60 films, and in approximately 50 television series. Best known as a screen actress, she started her career in theater. Not long after her arrival in New York City, she won an Obie Award for Best Actress in 1963 for her off-Broadway performance in Bertolt Brecht's Man Equals Man.

She later moved to film acting and won an Academy Award and a Golden Globe, among other accolades, for her performance in Moonstruck (1987). She received another Golden Globe nomination for Sinatra (1992) and Emmy Award nominations for Lucky Day (1991), More Tales of the City (1998) and Joan of Arc (1999). Dukakis's autobiography, Ask Me Again Tomorrow: A Life in Progress, was published in 2003.

Early life and education Olympia Dukakis was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, on June 20, 1931, the daughter of Alexandra "Alec" (née Christou) and Constantine "Costas" S. Dukakis. She had a brother, Apollo, six years her junior. Her cousin was former Massachusetts governor and 1988 U.S. presidential nominee Michael Dukakis. As a girl, she was significantly involved in sports and was a three-time New England fencing champion. She contended with pressures within her patriarchal Greek family and around her, "in a neighborhood where ethnic discrimination, particularly against Greeks, was routine."

Dukakis was an alumna of Arlington High School, and was educated at Boston University where she majored in physical therapy, earning a BA, of which she made use when treating patients with polio during the height of the epidemic. She later returned to BU and earned a Master of Fine Arts degree in performing arts.

By 1963, she had begun her career on screen. Transitioning to a professional life centered in New York City, she performed many times in productions in Central Park at the renowned Delacorte Theater. Returning to Western Massachusetts in 2013 for her last stage performance, she played Mother Courage in Mother Courage and Her Children at Shakespeare & Company, in Lenox, Massachusetts.

In 1963, Dukakis's early Off-Broadway presence was rewarded with an Obie Award for Distinguished Performance, as Widow Leocadia Begbick in Man Equals Man (a.k.a., A Man's A Man). She continued to perform there every few years, with her last appearance on that stage occurring in 2003, where she played multiple roles in The Chekov Cycle.

In 1973, along with her husband, Louis Zorich, and with other acting couples, she co-founded the Whole Theater Company. The company's first play was Our Town. With Dukakis as artistic director, the theater rolled out five productions per season for almost two decades. Across that span, productions included works by Euripides, Eugene O'Neill, Samuel Beckett, Tennessee Williams, Edward Albee, and Lanford Wilson. Among the actors performing with Dukakis and her husband were José Ferrer, Colleen Dewhurst, Blythe Danner, and Samuel L. Jackson.

Dukakis's stage directing credits include many classics, such as Orpheus Descending, The House of Bernarda Alba, Uncle Vanya, and A Touch of the Poet, as well as more contemporary works, such as One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and Kennedy's Children.

She also adapted plays such as "Mother Courage" and The Trojan Women for her Montclair, New Jersey-situated theater company. Her Broadway theatre credits include Who's Who in Hell and Social Security. She appeared in Martin Sherman's one-woman play, Rose, entirely a monologue about a woman who survived the Warsaw Ghetto, in London and then on Broadway. For the role, she won the 2000 Outer Critics Circle Awards for Outstanding Solo Performance. Twenty-two years after earning her first Obie, she won her second in 1985, an Ensemble Performance Award, for playing Soot Hudlocke in The Marriage of Bette and Boo.

Dukakis appeared in a number of films, including Steel Magnolias, Mr. Holland's Opus, Jane Austen's Mafia!, The Thing About My Folks and Moonstruck, for which she won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress.

She also played the role of Anna Madrigal in the Tales of the City television mini-series, which garnered her an Emmy Award nomination, and appeared on Search for Tomorrow as Dr. Barbara Moreno (1983), who romanced Stu Bergman. She appeared as Dolly Sinatra in the mini-series of Frank Sinatra's life (1992).

Moonstruck (1987) was directed by Norman Jewison who predicted Dukakis would receive honors for the role. She believed him after receiving the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. In addition to her Oscar, she took the Golden Globe in the same category. The honors compounded as she collected the Los Angeles and New York Film Critics Awards, all in recognition of her talent, some acting improvised, as she delivered a serious while hilarious performance. Her role of the no-nonsense matriarch, Rose Castorini, plays off Cher's Best Actress Award-winning role as daughter Loretta.

She was nominated for the Canadian Academy Award for The Event (2003) and in the middle of the first decade of the 21st century, her roles included 3 Needles, The Librarian: Return to King Solomon's Mines, In the Land of Women, and Away From Her, the 2006 film which cast her alongside Gordon Pinsent as the spouses of two Alzheimer's patients.

She took on significant work on the small screen as well. In 1998, she starred as Charlotte Kiszko in the British TV drama A Life for a Life: The True Story of Stefan Kiszko (ITV), based on the actual story of a man wrongfully imprisoned for seventeen years for the murder of a child, Lesley Molseed, after police suppressed evidence of his innocence.

In another genre entirely, she provided the voice of Grandpa's love interest for The Simpsons episode "The Old Man and the Key" (2002).

In 2000, she played alongside Ian Holm, Judi Dench, Joan Sims (her final acting performance before her death in 2001), and Romola Garai (her first professional role) in the television film The Last of the Blonde Bombshells. The same year, she starred in the revival of Tennessee Williams' The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore, opposite Kevin Anderson at the Hartford Stage, and co-adapted and starred in the world-premiere of Another Side of the Island, based on William Shakespeare's The Tempest, at Alpine Theatre Project in Whitefish, Montana.

In 2011, Dukakis guest-starred on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, as attorney Debby Marsh. In 2013, she starred in and executive-produced the 2013 film Montana Amazon, co-starring Haley Joel Osment. The same year, on May 24, she was honored with the 2,498th star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

In 2018, Dukakis starred in Eleftheromania, which follows an Auschwitz survivor as she recites a true story about a group from the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp. The following year, Dukakis reprised the role of Anna Madrigal, which she had first played in 1993, in a Netflix update of Armistead Maupin's Tales of The City.

Dukakis rides up Market Street as one of the Celebrity Grand Marshals in the LGBT Pride Parade in San Francisco on June 26, 2011, from the film, Olympia.

In 2018, Olympia, an American documentary film about her life and career, had its festival premiere at DOC NYC. The film, directed by Harry Mavromichalis, features Whoopi Goldberg, Laura Linney, Ed Asner, Lainie Kazan, Armistead Maupin, Austin Pendleton, Diane Ladd and Dukakis's cousin, Governor Michael Dukakis. It was released theatrically in the United States in July 2020.

Dukakis's final performance is as a judge in the 2021 film Not to Forget, directed by Valerio Zanoli.

Personal life

In 1962, Dukakis married fellow Manhattan stage actor Louis Zorich. Planning for a family, they moved out of the city in 1970 to settle in Montclair, New Jersey. It was there that they raised their three children: Christina, Peter, and Stefan. They had four grandchildren.

In her 2003 autobiography, Ask Me Again Tomorrow: A Life in Progress, Dukakis describes the challenges she faced as a first-generation Greek-American in an area with anti-Greek ethnic bigotry, violence, and discrimination; difficulties with her mother and in other relationships; and battles with substances and chronic illness.

She led an off-screen and off-stage active life. She taught acting for fifteen years at NYU and gave master classes for professional theatre universities, colleges, and companies across the country. For ten years, beginning in 1985, she studied with Indian mentor Srimata Gayatri Devi in the Vedanta school of Hindu philosophy.

A strong advocate for women's rights and LGBT rights, including same-sex marriage, Dukakis embraced the roles of a trans landlady in Tales of the City, She was a figure on the lecture circuit discussing topics such as women living with chronic illness, life in the theater, the environment, and feminism. She has said, I recognize that the real pulse of life is transformation, yet I work in a world dominated by men and the things men value, where transformation is not the coinage. It's not even the language!

Death After a period of ill health, Dukakis died under hospice care at her home in Manhattan on May 1, 2021, at the age of 89.

Filmography

Film

Stage + Year Title Role Notes 1961 Five Finger Exercises Louise Harrington Williamstown Theatre Festival 1961 J.B. Mrs. Botticelli Williamstown Theatre Festival 1961 Once in a Lifetime Helen Hobart Williamstown Theatre Festival 1961 Othello Emilia Williamstown Theatre Festival 1961 Romanoff and Juliet Evdokia Romanoff Williamstown Theatre Festival 1961 Toys in the Attic Carrie Bernier Williamstown Theatre Festival 1962 The Aspern Papers Assunta (Understudy) Playhouse Theatre, Broadway 1962 A Man's A Man Leocadia Begbick New Repertory Theatre, Off-Broadway 1963 A Birthday Party For Shakespeare Katherine Williamstown Theatre Festival 1963 The Cherry Orchard Charlotta Williamstown Theatre Festival 1963 The Zoo Story and The American Dream Mrs. Barker Williamstown Theatre Festival 1963 The Night of the Iguana Maxine Faulk Williamstown Theatre Festival 1963 Long Day's Journey into Night Mary Tyrone Williamstown Theatre Festival 1963 A Fair Country Amalie Freud Williamstown Theatre Festival 1964 Abraham Cochrane Anne Dowling Belasco Theatre, Broadway 1967 Titus Andronicus Tamora The Public Theater, Off-Broadway 1968 Camino Real The Gypsy Williamstown Theatre Festival 1968 Iphigeneia at Aulis Clytemnestra Williamstown Theatre Festival 1968 The Seagull Pauline Andreyevna Williamstown Theatre Festival 1968 The White Liars and Black Comedy Sophie Williamstown Theatre Festival 1969 Peer Gynt Anitra The Public Theater, Off-Broadway 1969 The Cherry Orchard Ranveskaya Williamstown Theatre Festival 1970 The Three Sisters Olga Williamstown Theatre Festival 1973 The Good Woman of Setzuan Shen Te Williamstown Theatre Festival 1973 Baba Goya Goya The American Place Theatre, Off-Broadway 1973 Nourish the Beast Goya Cherry Lane Theatre, Off-Broadway 1974 The Seagull Pauline Andreyevna Williamstown Theatre Festival 1974 Who's Who In Hell Ilse Lunt-Fontanne Theatre, Broadway 1975 Enemies Tatiana Williamstown Theatre Festival 1976 Orpheus Descending Lady Torrance Williamstown Theatre Festival 1978 Curse of the Starving Class Ella The Public Theater, Off-Broadway 1984 Peer Gynt Aase Williamstown Theatre Festival 1985 The Marriage of Bette and Boo Soot Hudlocke The Public Theater, Off-Broadway 1986 Social Security Sophie Greengrass Ethel Barrymore Theatre, Broadway 1989 Mother Courage And Her Children Mother Courage Williamstown Theatre Festival 1995 The Hope Zone Countess Circle Repertory Theatre, Off-Broadway 1996 The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore Flora Goforth Williamstown Theatre Festival 1998 Hecuba Hecuba Williamstown Theatre Festival 1998 The Lear Project King Lear Shakespeare & Company 2000 Rose Rose Lyceum Theatre, Broadway 2002 For The Pleasure of Seeing Her Again Nana Williamstown Theatre Festival 2003 The Chekhov Cycle Marina Williamstown Theatre Festival 2005 A Mother, A Daughter and a Gun Beatrice New World Stages, Off-Broadway 2006 70, Girls, 70 Ida Dodd New York City Center, Off-Broadway 2009 The Singing Forest Loë Rieman The Public Theater, Off-Broadway 2011 Vigil Aunt Grace Mark Taper Forum, Los Angeles 2011 The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore Flora Goforth Roundabout Theatre Company, Off-Broadway 2012 Elektra Chorus Leader American Conservatory Theater