Olympia Dukakis, the veteran stage and screen actor whose flair for maternal roles helped her win an Oscar as Cher’s mother in the romantic comedy Moonstruck, has died. She was 89.
Olympia Dukakis was born June 20, 1931 in Lowell, Massachusetts, the daughter of Alexandra “Alec” and Constantine “Costa” S. Dukakis. Her parents were Greek emigrants. She had a brother named Apollo, six years her junior. As a girl, she dominated in sports and was a three-time New England fencing champion. She was an alumna of Arlington High School in Arlington, Massachusetts and was educated at Boston University where she majored in Physical Therapy, earning a BA, which she made use of when treating patients with polio during the epidemic. She later returned to B.U. and earned a Master of Fine Arts degree.
In 1960, she made her off-Broadway debut and two years later had a small part in The Aspen Papers on Broadway. After three years with a Boston regional theatre, Dukakis moved to New York and married actor Louis Zorich.
During their first years of marriage, acting jobs were scarce, and Dukakis worked as a bartender, waitress and other jobs.
She and Zorich had three children — Christina, Peter and Stefan. They decided it was too hard to raise children in New York with limited income, so they moved the family to a century-old house in Montclair, a New Jersey suburb of New York. Zorich died in January 2018 at age 93.
Dukakis’s 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.
Her recent projects included the 2019 TV miniseries Tales of the City and the upcoming film Not to Forget.
But the stage was her first love. For two decades she ran the Whole Theater Company in Montclair, N.J., specializing in classic dramas.
“My ambition wasn’t to win the Oscar,” Dukakis commented after her Moonstruck win. “It was to play the great parts.”
She accomplished that in such New York productions as Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children, Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night and Tennessee Williams’s The Rose Tattoo.