Late-blooming actor got Oscar-winning breakthrough in Moonstruck at 56

‘‘Success has never been easy for me. I was pushing the Oscar away the moment I accepted it.’’

Olympia Dukakis actor b June 20, 1931 d May 1, 2021

Olympia Dukakis, who has died aged 89, was a versatile actress who toiled in obscurity onstage for decades before her Oscar-winning breakthrough at 56 as Cher’s sardonic mother in the romantic comedy Moonstruck.

The 1987 film, about the exasperation, disappointment and unpredictability of love, was a light comedic showcase for Cher and Nicolas Cage as Brooklynites in the throes of agony and ecstasy. As the tart-tongued matriarch Rose Castorini, Dukakis suffers the infidelity of her neglectful husband, and finds herself the object of the sexual fascination of a womanising professor.

The film received an Oscar nomination for best picture, and

Cher won for best actress, Dukakis for best support actress and John Patrick

Shanley for best original screenplay.

Dukakis’ critical and commercial triumph brought a long-simmering career to a boil. ‘‘I’ve been ‘discovered’ about six times, y’know,’’ she once told The Washington Post.

At the Academy Awards in 1988, she used the platform to promote the presidential prospects of her cousin, then-Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis. He later received the Democratic nomination in what they both called the ‘‘year of the Dukakii’’.

Moonstruck made her a premier character actress in Hollywood. She was one of a tightknit circle of Southern belles in Steel Magnolias (1989) and a stuffy high school principal in Mr Holland’s Opus (1995). She also attracted a devoted following as the marijuana-harvesting, transgender San Francisco landlady Mrs Madrigal in Tales of the City, a miniseries based on Armistead Maupin’s books that has aired in various incarnations since the 1990s.

Mostly she specialised in wise, meddlesome or cynical mothers. She was Jack Lemmon’s wife in Dad and Kirstie Alley’s mother in the franchise launched by Look Who’s Talking (both 1989). She earned an Emmy nomination playing a mother who is a recovering alcoholic in the TV movie Lucky Day (1991) and portrayed Frank Sinatra’s mother in the 1992 miniseries Sinatra.

Before Moonstruck, she subsisted as a stage actress, playing classical and modern tragic parts from Aeschylus’ Clytemnestra to Eugene O’Neill’s Mary Tyrone. She maxed out the family credit cards to pay her daughter’s college tuition and took out additional mortgages on her home in the New York City suburb where she ran an acclaimed regional theatre for almost 20 years on a shoestring.

After her Oscar success, she enthused: ‘‘I can buy books without thinking twice. My son forced me to buy myself a house by the sea – a place on the Caribbean island of St Maartens that I’ve named Moonstruck. Before, I would never have spent money on something like this . . . I only dealt with necessities. Still, I’m renting it out . . . I’m too much of a Greek – some part of me can’t do it all the way.’’

Olympia Mary Dukakis was born to Greek immigrants in Massachusetts. Her father trained as a lawyer but failed the bar exam. Reduced to working in a textile mill, he was prone to rage, Dukakis recalled. Her mother, also a mill worker, was physically abusive. But both parents expressed an appreciation for aesthetic pleasures. Her father belonged to a theatre group, and her mother played piano.

Olympia was encouraged to pursue a more practical career. She won a scholarship to study physical therapy at Boston University, graduating in 1953. She helped start a theatre in Boston before heading for New York, where she appeared regularly on stage.

In 1962, she married actor Louis Zorich and, with her actor brother Apollo, organised the Whole Theatre in a church basement. When Zorich was almost killed in a car crash in 1977, leaving him unable to work for two years, Dukakis sought extra income. She started teaching at New York University’s theatre department, appeared in spaghetti sauce commercials and took a recurring role as a therapist in a soap opera.

In 1986 she was cast as Meryl Streep’s daft mother in the film Heartburn, but her part was cut from the final version. Then film director Norman Jewison, who had seen her on Broadway, hired her for Moonstruck without even the formality of a screen test.

Although her theatre was shuttered in 1990 amid a recession, Dukakis continued to appear onstage. Among her film roles, she played Jocasta, part of the Greek chorus, in Woody Allen’s Mighty Aphrodite (1995), the understanding wife of an Alzheimer’s patient in Away From Her (2006), and a thick-skinned aunt of Bryan Cranston’s undercover drug agent in The Infiltrator (2016).

Her husband died in 2018. They had three children, and four grandchildren.

‘‘Success has never been easy for me,’’ she said in 1992. ‘‘I was pushing the Oscar away the moment I accepted it. What I finally realised is that the good, the bad, are all a part of the journey. People think of an Oscar as the culmination of your life, payment for so many sacrifices. To me, it’s less about reward than evolution.’’ –