Oscar winner’s natural charm
Olympia Dukakis Actress BORN JUNE 20, 1931 – DIED MAY 1, 2021, AGED 89
OLYMPIA Dukakis won an Oscar at the age of 56 for best supporting actress in the romantic comedy Moonstruck, in which she played Rose Castorini.
In the film, Rose’s widowed daughter, played by Cher, falls in love with her fiancé’s brother.
Although born to Greek parents, Dukakis brilliantly captured the essence of an Italian-American matriarch and audiences were spellbound by Rose’s rasping rebukes to her offspring.
In the 1969 film John And Mary, she played the mother of Dustin Hoffman, and was Jack Lemmon’s brusque wife in Dad in 1989.
In the same year she won acclaim for her role in Steel Magnolias, which also starred Dolly Parton, Julia Roberts and Shirley MacLaine. She told one interviewer: “It was certainly life-affirming for lots of women.”
In 2000, Dukakis starred with Judi Dench in the BBC television play The Last Of The Blonde
Bombshells.The following year she worked with JulieWalters in ITV’s My Beautiful Son.
Born in Lowell, Massachusetts, Olympia Dukakis’s Greek immigrant father Costa was a keen amateur performer and gave his daughter a love of the stage from an early age.
She made her stage debut in New York in 1960 in The Breaking Wall and two years later married actor Louis Zorich, with whom she established two theatrical companies. Her big break came in Moonstruck; audiences enjoyed her seemingly effortless ability to convey complex characters in an
easily understood way. She could switch between comedy and tragedy in the blink of an eye.
Her cousin, Michael Dukakis, ran for US President but lost to George Bush senior.
Dukakis is survived by two sons, Peter and Stefan, and a daughter, Christina, who all work in films.