Olympia Dukakis, the Oscar-winning actor whose hit films included Moonstruck and Steel Magnolias, has died. She was 89.
Dukakis’s brother, Apollo Dukakis, announced the news on Facebook on Saturday, writing that “after many months of failing health” his “beloved sister, Olympia Dukakis, passed away this morning in New York City”.
Dukakis won an Oscar for best supporting actor for Moonstruck, a 1987 film in which she played the mother of the lead character played by Cher opposite Nicolas Cage. Other films included Look Who’s Talking and its sequel, Working Girl and Mr Holland’s Opus.
In an extensive television career, she appeared as Anna Madrigal, a transgender San Francisco landlord, in multiple series based on Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City.
“I always played older,” she told the New York Times in a 2004 interview. “I think it was the voice.”
Dukakis had an extensive career on the US stage and married another successful actor, Louis Zorich, in 1962. They had three children.
They appeared together once, in a production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf by Edward Albee for the theatre company they founded in Montclair, New Jersey in 1979. On Zorich’s death in 2018, aged 93, the Times quoted a 1991 interview in which he said the couple got so into their roles as a warring couple they “almost got divorced”.
On Saturday, Apollo Dukakis wrote that his sister was “finally at peace and with her Louis”.
Born in Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1931, Olympia Dukakis was a cousin of Michael Dukakis, a former governor of Massachusetts who lost the 1988 US presidential election to George HW Bush.
In 2012, she told the Guardian she felt her Greek ancestry meant she “was an outsider and that I never quite fit in – both in relation to Greek culture and mainstream US culture. Growing up, I was always kind of torn between those two worlds, never quite according enough respect to either one. But that’s OK.”
She delved more deeply into her experience growing up in a 2001 interview, saying: “We fought the Armenians, we fought the Irish, we fought the French, they fought us. We were just eight or nine and we’d call each other greaseball, Mick, wop and so on. And of course we’d make fun of each other’s names.”
Describing Zorich’s near-death in a car crash in 1977, she said: “The casting people knew what had happened, and they would call up and give me two or three days in movies. People were very kind because they knew that we were [struggling]. I remember thinking, ‘It’s too hard. I wanna stop, I just wanna stop.’”
But acting proved too much of a draw – as well as “the only thing I could make a living at”.
“The process is endlessly interesting,” she said. “How you change as you work and as you get older. You somehow get to know more about who you are and what you are and why you are.”
Success, she said, was also sometimes hard to manage.
“I had a difficult time with it. People said to me, ‘Oh, you’ve paid your dues.’ But so had a lot of people. And what about all those incredible plays I was in? To make a fuss about the Oscar felt like a betrayal.
“Finally it occurred to me: maybe good fortune comes to you for the same reason as bad. It’s all about understanding more: you learn a lot of things when you’re struggling, and other things when you’re what the world calls successful. Or perhaps it’s just something that happens. Some days it’s cold and some days it hot.”