S.F. Greek Film Fest celebrates Dukakis
If you want to understand Olympia Dukakis, Carey Perloff says it helps to know your Greek drama. Perloff, the former artistic director of American Conservatory Theater, directed Dukakis in productions of the Greek classics “Elektra” and “Hecuba” for the company and calls the Academy Awardwinning actress “Greek to her core.”
Directing Dukakis in “Hecuba,” in 1998, there was a moment when the actor stopped rehearsal to ask Perloff why her character, the fallen queen of Troy, would plead her case in certain words before King Agamemnon.
“‘Hecuba’ is a play about a woman whose whole country was destroyed,” Perloff says. “She’s a refugee, one of the Trojan women, she takes justice in her own hands. Olympia is interested in the nature of justice, what happens to people
who can’t get justice or feel they are outside the bounds of justice.”
It’s a theme, Perloff says, that came up repeatedly in their discussions about the play, and about life in and out of the theater.
“She is interested in who gets to write history,” Perloff says. “And what does it mean to tell your history, especially as a woman?”
Perloff is one of many friends and colleagues to offer their perspectives on Dukakis’ own history in Harry Mavromichalis’ new documentary, “Olympia,” opening the San Francisco Greek Film Festival on Sunday, Oct. 20, at the Castro Theater. “Olympia,” which was filmed from 2011 to ’14, shows the now88yearold at work in the theater and at home with her family. It also chronicles honors, like receiving her star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2013 and being celebrity grand marshal at the 2011 San Francisco LGBT Pride Parade.
She will receive the festival’s 2019 Honorary Astron Award for career achievement.
Dukakis has certainly had a career worthy of documentation. Born in Lowell, Mass., to Greek immigrant parents, she had a respected early career as a theater actor, but her breakout success in film didn’t come until the 1980s, when she was already middleaged. But what success.
Iconic roles like the outspoken but genteel Clairee Belcher in the allstar Southern dramedy “Steel Magnolias” and her Academy Awardwinning supporting actress role as Rose Castorini in “Moonstruck” established her as a force on film.
Dukakis parlayed her highs in the 1980s into three more decades of memorable movie and television characters, most recently reprising her role as transgender landlady Anna Madrigal in Netflix’s revival of Armistead Maupin’s San Franciscoset “Tales of the City.”
Filmmaker Mavromichalis, who worked with Dukakis organizing an acting workshop in Cyprus, says that as he got to know the actor he saw the need to document her frank and intellectual musings on art and life.
Among the first major public events Mavromichalis filmed Dukakis at was the 2011 San Francisco Gay Pride Parade, where he saw firsthand her iconography in the city. Dukakis’ “Tales” role as Anna Madrigal is one of the most identifiable of her career: The San Francisco earth mother to her family of misfit tenants, who just happened to be transgender.
“To this day she says Anna is her best part because it was such a deep and complex part and because Armistead Maupin is so wonderful at crafting characters,” Mavromichalis says. “Meeting trans people was part of the process of her finding the character. It pushed her to find new things, that’s what she wants as an actor.”
At the San Francisco Pride Parade, the filmmaker recalls people of all ages “freezing when they saw her, some would even cry. Between her identification with ‘Tales’ and her work in the theater here, she identifies it as a second home,” Mavromichalis says of San Francisco.
Appropriately, given Dukakis and Mavromichalis’ shared Greek heritage, a journey back to her mother’s ancestral village in Greece is central to the film. The trip was part of a yearslong fascination she had with the prehistoric mythological figure of the “Great Mother” who predated most patriarchal societal structures.
“She had a thirst for knowledge on the subject and spoke to historians and archaeologists,” Mavromichalis says. “At one of the festival screenings, someone asked why we didn’t focus on Olympia’s father more. I said this was a film about mothers and the matrilineal.”
At 88, Dukakis doesn’t travel much anymore and won’t be coming out for the San Francisco screening. Following a rough period after the death of her husband, Mavromichalis says she’s again “doing great,” after working last year on the new “Tales.”
“She also still teaches,” he says. “She doesn’t go to NYU anymore, the students come to her apartment, she concentrates on that.”
One of the teaching exercises Perloff remembers Dukakis frequently employing at A.C.T. was one where performers had to find space for themselves in the room after the beat changed. Often, the women would go to the corners of the room while the men were in the center.
“She wouldn’t have that,” Perloff says. “She’d help them take center stage and use their full voice. She has an incredible ability to dial down to the internal conflict and help you pick your head up.”