The stage veteran who had a cinematic second act

Olympia Dukakis 1931–2021

For Olympia Dukakis, big-screen success was a long time coming. The actress was playing stage roles and maxing out credit cards to pay her daughter’s college tuition when, at age 56, she was cast as Cher’s sardonic, meddling mother in the romantic comedy Moonstruck. Dukakis stole many a scene and took home an Oscar in 1988—the same year her cousin Michael Dukakis won the Democratic presidential nomination. She subsequently played a series of strong-willed, worldly women, including Kirstie Alley’s overbearing mother in the Look Who’s Talking trilogy, and a spirited widow in Steel Magnolias (1989) who delivers zingers such as “The only thing that separates us from the animals is our ability to accessorize.” Dukakis was somewhat mystified by her late-blooming fame. “Perhaps it’s just something that happens,” she said in 2001. “Some days it’s cold, and some days it’s hot.”

Born in Lowell, Mass., Dukakis “yearned to be an actor from an early age,” said the Associated Press. Her Greek immigrant parents, though, insisted on a more practical path. So she studied physical therapy at Boston University and spent several years working with polio victims before returning to BU to study drama. Dukakis moved to New York City in 1959, arriving with $60 and a dream of playing the great roles, said The Times (U.K.). Instead, the actress recalled, she found herself in a boarding house where “you shared the bath in the hall with two drunken Ukrainians.” Dukakis landed her first Broadway role, in The Aspern Papers, in 1962 and began taking small TV and movie parts, while also running a theater company with her husband, actor Louis Zorich, in Montclair, N.J. She was cast in Moonstruck after director Norman Jewison saw her in Social Security, a hit Broadway comedy in which she played “a selfpitying, cranky 80-year-old mother who is swept off her feet by a 98-year-old famous artist.” Despite her screen success, Dukakis “never gave up theater,” said The New York Times.

She starred in an off-Broadway production of Tennessee Williams’ The Milk Train Doesn’t

Stop Here Anymore in 2011, and the next year played Prospero in The Tempest for Shakespeare & Company in Massachusetts. Asked in 2003 if she planned to retire, she laughed off the question. “From what?” she replied. “I love this chaotic, contradictory, loving mess that has been my life.”