Olympia Dukakis, Oscar-winning “Moonstruck” star, dies at 89
MAPLEWOOD, N.J.» Olympia Dukakis, the veteran stage and screen actress whose flair for maternal roles helped her win an Oscar as Cher’s mother in the romantic comedy “Moonstruck,” has died. She was 89.
Dukakis died Saturday morning in her home in New York City, according to Allison Levy, her agent at Innovative Artists. A cause of death was not released.
Dukakis won her Oscar through a surprising chain of circumstances, beginning with author Nora Ephron’s recommendation that she play Meryl Streep’s mother in the film version of Ephron’s book “Heartburn.” Dukakis got the role, but her scenes were cut from the film. To make it up to her, director Mike Nichols cast her in his hit play “Social Security.” Director Norman Jewison saw her in that role and cast her in “Moonstruck.”
Dukakis won the Oscar for best supporting actress, and Cher took home the trophy for best actress.
She referred to her 1988 win as “the year of the Dukakii” because Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis, her cousin, was the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee.
Dukakis, born in Lowell, Mass., had yearned to be an actress from an early age and had hoped to study drama in college.
Her Greek immigrant parents insisted she pursue a more practical education, so she studied physical therapy at Boston University on a scholarship from the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis.
After three years with a Boston regional theater, she moved to New York and married actor Louis Zorich. They had three children. He died in 2018.
Her Oscar victory kept the motherly film roles coming. She was Kirstie Alley’s
mom in “Look Who’s Talking” and its sequel “Look Who’s Talking Too,” the sardonic widow in “Steel Magnolias” and the overbearing wife of Jack Lemmon (and mother of Ted Danson) in “Dad.”
She was in New York productions of Bertolt Brecht’s “Mother Courage and Her Children,” Eugene O’Neill’s “Long Day’s Journey into Night” and Tennessee Williams’ “The Rose Tattoo.”