Olympia Dukakis (June 20, 1931 – May 1, 2021) was an American actress. She performed in more than 130 stage productions, in some 60 films, and in approximately 50 television series. Best known as a screen actress, she started her career in theater. Not long after her arrival in New York City, she won an Obie Award for Best Actress in 1963 for her off-Broadway performance in Bertolt Brecht's Man Equals Man.
She later moved to film acting and won an Academy Award and a Golden Globe, among other accolades, for her performance in Moonstruck (1987). She received another Golden Globe nomination for Sinatra (1992) and Emmy Award nominations for Lucky Day (1991), More Tales of the City (1998) and Joan of Arc (1999). Dukakis's autobiography, Ask Me Again Tomorrow: A Life in Progress, was published in 2003. In 2018, a feature-length documentary about her life, titled Olympia, was released theatrically in the United States.
Olympia Dukakis (Greek: Ολυμπία Δουκάκη) was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, on June 20, 1931, the daughter of Alexandra "Alec" (née Christou) and Constantine "Costas" S. Dukakis. Her parents were Greek immigrants; her father a refugee from Anatolia, and her mother an immigrant from the Peloponnese. She had a brother, Apollo, six years her junior. Her cousin was former Massachusetts governor and 1988 U.S. presidential nominee Michael Dukakis. As a girl, she was significantly involved in sports and was a three-time New England fencing champion. She contended with pressures within her patriarchal Greek family and around her, "in a neighborhood where ethnic discrimination, particularly against Greeks, was routine."
Dukakis was an alumna of Arlington High School, and was educated at Boston University where she majored in physical therapy, earning a BA, of which she made use when treating patients with polio during the height of the epidemic. She later returned to BU and earned a Master of Fine Arts degree in performing arts.
Prior to appearing in films, Dukakis began a decades-long stage life. She started in productions at the Williamstown Theatre Festival in Williamstown, Massachusetts.
By 1963, she had begun her career on screen. Transitioning to a professional life centered in New York City, she performed many times in productions in Central Park at the renowned Delacorte Theater. Returning to Western Massachusetts in 2013 for her last stage performance, she played Mother Courage in Mother Courage and Her Children at Shakespeare & Company, in Lenox, Massachusetts.
In 1963, Dukakis's early Off-Broadway presence was rewarded with an Obie Award for Distinguished Performance, as Widow Leocadia Begbick in Man Equals Man (a.k.a., A Man's A Man). She continued to perform there every few years, with her last appearance on that stage occurring in 2003, where she played multiple roles in The Chekov Cycle.
In 1973, along with her husband, Louis Zorich, and with other acting couples, she co-founded the Whole Theater Company. The company's first play was Our Town. With Dukakis as artistic director, the theater rolled out five productions per season for almost two decades. Across that span, productions included works by Euripides, Eugene O'Neill, Samuel Beckett, Tennessee Williams, Edward Albee, and Lanford Wilson. Among the actors performing with Dukakis and her husband were José Ferrer, Colleen Dewhurst, Blythe Danner, and Samuel L. Jackson.
Dukakis's stage directing credits include many classics, such as Orpheus Descending, The House of Bernarda Alba, Uncle Vanya, and A Touch of the Poet, as well as more contemporary works, such as One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and Kennedy's Children.
She also adapted plays such as "Mother Courage" and The Trojan Women for her Montclair, New Jersey-situated theater company. Her Broadway theatre credits include Who's Who in Hell and Social Security. She appeared in Martin Sherman's one-woman play, Rose, entirely a monologue about a woman who survived the Warsaw Ghetto, in London and then on Broadway. For the role, she won the 2000 Outer Critics Circle Awards for Outstanding Solo Performance. Twenty-two years after earning her first Obie, she won her second in 1985, an Ensemble Performance Award, for playing Soot Hudlocke in The Marriage of Bette and Boo.
Dukakis' first appearance on screen was in avant-garde film creator Gregory J. Markopoulos' 1963 film Twice a Man, in which she plays the role of the protagonist's mother whom he meets as a young woman.
Dukakis appeared in a number of films, including Steel Magnolias, Mr. Holland's Opus, Jane Austen's Mafia!, The Thing About My Folks and Moonstruck, for which she won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress.
She also played the role of Anna Madrigal in the Tales of the City television mini-series, which garnered her an Emmy Award nomination, and appeared on Search for Tomorrow as Dr. Barbara Moreno (1983), who romanced Stu Bergman. She appeared as Dolly Sinatra in the mini-series of Frank Sinatra's life (1992).
Moonstruck (1987) was directed by Norman Jewison who predicted Dukakis would receive honors for the role. She believed him after receiving the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. In addition to her Oscar, she took the Golden Globe in the same category. The honors compounded as she collected the Los Angeles and New York Film Critics Awards, all in recognition of her talent, some acting improvised, as she delivered a serious while hilarious performance. Her role of the no-nonsense matriarch, Rose Castorini, plays off Cher's Best Actress Award-winning role as daughter Loretta.
She was nominated for the Canadian Academy Award for The Event (2003) and in the middle of the first decade of the 21st century, her roles included 3 Needles, The Librarian: Return to King Solomon's Mines, In the Land of Women, and Away From Her, the 2006 film which cast her alongside Gordon Pinsent as the spouses of two Alzheimer's patients.
She took on significant work on the small screen as well. In 1998, she starred as Charlotte Kiszko in the British TV drama A Life for a Life: The True Story of Stefan Kiszko (ITV), based on the actual story of a man wrongfully imprisoned for seventeen years for the murder of a child, Lesley Molseed, after police suppressed evidence of his innocence.
In another genre entirely, she provided the voice of Grandpa's love interest for The Simpsons episode "The Old Man and the Key" (2002).
In 2000, she played alongside Ian Holm, Judi Dench, Joan Sims (her final acting performance before her death in 2001), and Romola Garai (her first professional role) in the television film The Last of the Blonde Bombshells.