Olympia Dukakis

Olympia Mary Dukakis (Ολυμπία Δουκάκη, in Greek), was born on June 20, 1931 in Lowell, Massachusetts, into a family of Greek emigrants. “The neighborhood that she lived in was very intolerant of Greeks and other ethnicities,” she stated. She was the cousin of politician Michael Dukakis, twice Governor of Massachusetts and Democratic Party candidate for President of the United States in the 1988 presidential election, when he lost to George HW Bush. As a child, she excelled in sports, and was a three-time New England fencing champion. She received a degree in physical therapy from Boston University.

He began his journey in the theater, winning an Obie award –the most prestigious on the independent scene– for his work in “A man is a man”, by Bertolt Brecht . From the summer of 1963 until a few years before her death, Olympia Dukakis was a regular at the Williamstown Summer Theatre, the theater festival in her home state. While performing “Medea” in New York, she met fellow actor Louis Zorich , whom she married in 1962. The two moved out of town in 1970 to settle in Montclair, New Jersey, where they raised their three children: Christina , Peter and Stefan.

In the audiovisual field, he began his activity in his thirties, with supporting roles in the medical series Las enfermeras and Doctor Kildare . “They recommended that I change my name to one that would not betray my Greek origin, which would have smoothed the way for me, but I always refused,” he recalled. On film, Olympia Dukakis  first appeared as a young mother in the obscure 1964 drama Twice a Man . She then played a pastry shop clerk in Brian de Palma ‘s Sisters , and a policewoman in The City Vigilante , and the mother of the protagonist in Forjador de idolos. She had some impact in the United States with the Search for Tomorrow series , where she gave life to a doctor. But her career changed when she won the Oscar and the Golden Globe for best secondary for Moonstruck , where she played a downtrodden housewife, mother of the female lead. “The director, Norman Jewison , told me that I would be rewarded for my work. I didn’t believe him, but then his words were prophetic,” she recalled. “Thanks to the success of this film I was able to pay for my children’s education.” 

Since then, Olympia Dukakis has  been a secondary recruited to give prestige to different productions, such as Armas de mujer , where she was chief of staff, Look Who’s Talking , and its sequels, where she played Rosie Jensen, mother of Kirstie Alley, and Magnolias from steel , in which he gave life to the always smiling Clairee Belcher, a millionaire widow. Woody Allen recruited her to play Jocasta, mother of Oedipus, in the sequences in which characters from Greek mythology appeared in Mighty Aphrodite , and Bille August to become a matriarch, leader of a Jewish community in Jerusalem .. She also played Frank Sinatra ‘s mother in the Sinatra biographical series , and the school principal in Professor Holland .

For fifteen years she worked as a professor of interpretation at the University of New York. With the arrival of the 21st century, Olympia Dukakis fell somewhat into oblivion, although she did not stop working at a good pace, in productions with less impact. Among her latest works, Bryan Cranston ‘s wealthy aunt stands out , in Departed , and the elderly transsexual Ana Madrigal, in San Francisco Stories .