Olympia Dukakis, Oscar-Winning 'Moonstruck' Star, Dies At 89

 

Olympia Dukakis and Cher hold the Golden Globe awards they received for performances in the hit movie Moonstruck in 1988. Later that awards season, they both won Oscars.

Reed Saxon/AP

MAPLEWOOD, N.J. — Olympia Dukakis, the veteran stage and screen actress whose flair for maternal roles helped her win an Oscar as Cher's mother in the romantic comedy Moonstruck, has died. She was 89.

Dukakis died Saturday morning in her home in New York City, according to Allison Levy, her agent at Innovative Artists. A cause of death was not immediately released.

Dukakis won her Oscar through a surprising chain of circumstances, beginning with author Nora Ephron's recommendation that she play Meryl Streep's mother in the film version of Ephron's book Heartburn. Dukakis got the role, but her scenes were cut from the film. To make it up to her, director Mike Nichols cast her in his hit play Social Security.

Director Norman Jewison saw her in that role and cast her in Moonstruck. Dukakis won the Oscar for best supporting actress and Cher took home the trophy for best actress.

She referred to her 1988 win as "the year of the Dukakii" because it was also the year Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis, her cousin, was the Democratic Party's presidential nominee. At the ceremony, she held her Oscar high over her head and called out: "OK, Michael, let's go!"

Dukakis, who was born in Lowell, Mass., had yearned to be an actress from an early age and had hoped to study drama in college. Her Greek immigrant parents insisted she pursue a more practical education, so she studied physical therapy at Boston University on a scholarship from the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis.

After earning her bachelor's degree, she worked at an understaffed hospital in Marmet, W.Va., and at a hospital in Boston.

But the lure of the theater eventually led her to study drama at Boston University.

It was a shocking change, she told an interviewer in 1988, noting that she had gone from the calm world of science to one where students routinely screamed at the teachers.

"I thought they were all nuts," she said. "It was wonderful."

Her first graduate school performance was a disaster, however, as she sat wordless on the stage.

After a teacher helped cure her stage fright, she began working in summer stock theaters. In 1960, she made her off-Broadway debut and two years later had a small part in The Aspern Papers on Broadway.

After three years with a Boston regional theater, Dukakis moved to New York and married actor Louis Zorich.