Olympia Dukakis remembered: A life in the theater, and then ‘Moonstruck’ made her famous

We forget how people say things, exactly.

We forget, even if we remember who said “Your life’s going down the toilet!”

Olympia Dukakis said it in “Moonstruck.” She won the Academy Award for best supporting actress of 1987, which is hardly the only reason her life and work, which ended May 1, at 89, means so much to so many.

Directed by Norman Jewison, the “Moonstruck” script was written by John Patrick Shanley, who also won an Oscar that year, as did Cher for the same lovely, cockeyed romantic comedy.

Dukakis played Rose Castorini, fierce and weary, withering but kind, missing nothing, a woman dealing with a cheating husband, just as Dukakis did in her life with longtime spouse and fellow actor Louis Zorich, who died in 2018. She wrote about that in her autobiography.

In “Moonstruck” Rose’s conflicted daughter (Cher) is engaged to a good but passive man (Danny Aiello) while falling for his ardent, operatically scaled younger brother (Nicolas Cage). In the kitchen, Rose assesses the situation before her: Her daughter, a widower, is engaged to a man not currently in the country, yet there she is, coming in after a ravishing late night with her fiancee’s brother, with a love bite on her neck. Then comes the line people remember: “Your life’s going down the toilet!”

Two things must be said about that, in the late actor’s honor.

One: That line wasn’t Shanley’s, as Dukakis (cousin of onetime presidential hopeful Michael Dukakis) claimed on the Canadian talk show “George Stroumboulopoulos Tonight.” It wasn’t even Dukakis’s. It belonged, rather, to Dukakis’s first-generation Greek-American mother. “That was my mother’s line to me once,” she told the talk show host.

Two: Watch that scene again. (Watch the movie again while you’re at it.) People tend to remember the toilet line as being the culminating zinger in a blowout of an argument, a screamer of a line.

Not true. Well: It’s true that, seeing “Moonstruck” when it first came out, with an audience, that line killed, like so many lines from that film about a hopelessly lovestruck Italian-American family looking for some reconciliation from without and within. But it’s practically thrown away — in the best, funniest, truest way — by Dukakis, who already had decades of stage work and some film and TV work behind her. She knew. She knew how much sauce it needed, and no more, to keep the scene moving.

On the same talk show, Dukakis laid out the impact of “Moonstruck” very simply. She and Zorich were living in Montclair, N.J., putting their kids through college on credit cards, nearing the end of their 17-year affiliation with the theater they cofounded there. Government cuts in arts funding had made things very difficult for the nonprofit venture. They’d done it — she and Zorich carved out a life, mostly in the theater, sometimes on Broadway, for themselves and their kids. But it wasn’t easy and, as David Mamet once said, “The theater is a beautiful life but a harsh business.”

Then came “Moonstruck.”

She told Stroumboulopoulos: “It’s like somebody said, ‘Look: She waited all these years — let’s give her something good.’” Dukakis was 56 when she picked up her Oscar, and her career ran with it.

In addition to “Steel Magnolias” (1989), four rounds of “Tales from the City” (spanning 1993 to 2019), and so many other films, shows and theatrical projects, Dukakis wrote about her eventful, often difficult life in her 2003 memoir “Ask Me Again Tomorrow.” She was also the subject of a recent documentary, “Olympia.”

In Chicago, in 2008, she directed “Botanic Garden” at Victory Gardens Theatre. Her final film role, a judge in the independent movie “Not to Forget,” co-starring the late Cloris Leachman and Tatum O’Neal, has yet to be released.

As a young woman growing up in Lowell, Massachusetts, Dukakis — named after the only child of Hippolyta, Queen of The Amazons, and the Greek god Zeus, King of Olympus — constantly, metaphorically hit the brick wall of her parents’ idea of propriety and a woman’s place in this world. The documentary “Olympia” covers that subject, albeit tentatively, along with the Dukakis family’s experience with anti-Greek prejudice.

In her memoir she wrote about living “in the hyphen” as a Greek-American, navigating her mother’s perpetual threats of physical violence and, as she pursued her own theatrical ambitions, Dukakis’s struggles with addiction and depression. She didn’t hide a lot in life; in her work, she had no business hiding anything. In her finest roles, such as Rose Castorini in “Moonstruck,” the woman on screen becomes both a writer’s conduit and the audience’s key to understanding what’s at stake.

As a young woman, she proved herself a champion fencer. Is there a better sport for someone whose livelihood so often depended on a related set of dueling skills?

“I recognize that the real pulse of life is transformation,” Dukakis told author Margaret Wolff for a collection of interviews published under the title “In Sweet Company.” “Yet I work in a world dominated by men and the things men value, where transformation is not the coinage. It’s not even the language!”

“Moonstruck” may have been written by an Irish-American male, but it knows the score. Rose Castorini is a woman trying to maintain honor, tradition, family pride and some semblance of warmth and sanity when everybody’s screwing up or falling apart around her.

The two, priceless scenes between Dukakis and John Mahoney deserve the last word. I wrote about them when Mahoney died three years ago. Rose is dining alone at her favorite Brooklyn trattoria. Mahoney plays an NYU professor whose date, a student half his age, ditches the professor after a callous remark, tossing a glass of water in his face on the way out.

The characters played by Dukakis and Mahoney, the hurting, dignified woman and the wolfish boy-man, end up eating not alone, but together. Why do men cheat, she wants to know. “Nerves,” he replies. How the scene plays out remains a masterpiece of everything: writing, direction, pacing and, above all, acting.

Mahoney was relatively new to films then; Dukakis, a little older, had the edge, but both were fantastically skillful stage animals learning how to be equally skillful on camera before our astonished and grateful eyes.

“I know who I am,” Rose says, explaining in five words why she isn’t going to sleep with this man. Throughout her life, Dukakis was nobody’s idea of an inward presence; her voice, so expressively weathered and rumbly, was a key weapon in her performer’s arsenal. She was formidable, and in lesser material, her technique was what you noticed more than the scene itself.

But throughout that life, she sought the kind of self-knowledge that made lines like those five perfect syllables from “Moonstruck” more like breathing than acting. More like life than the movies.

Or both, maybe. Let’s say both. If it’s the right kind of both, we remember.

Where to watch: “Moonstruck” is streaming for free for subscribers on Amazon Prime and Tubi (with commercials); also available on demand for $3.99. The documentary “Olympia” is streaming on YouTube, iTunes and other platforms.

Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.

mjphillips@chicagotribune.com

Twitter @phillipstribune

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