Olympia Dukakis
("Margie Carsen")

Olympia Dukakis has worked as an actress, director, producer, teacher and activist in a career that spans more than 40 years. She received an Academy Award®, a New York Film Critics Award, a Los Angeles Film Critics Award and the Golden Globe Award for her work in the Norman Jewison film Moonstruck. Her other feature film credits include The Intended, The Event, Picture Perfect, Mafia, Mr. Holland's Opus, Mighty Aphrodite, I Love Trouble, the three Look Who's Talking movies, The Cemetery Club, Steel Magnolias and Dad. On television, Dukakis co-starred in HBO's Last of the Blond Bombshells; Ladies and the Champ; Tales of the City, a six-hour miniseries, and the sequels More Tales of the City and Further Tales of the City (Showtime), for which she earned Emmy, Screen Actors Guild and BAFTA nominations. She also starred with Frank Sinatra and her husband, Louis Zorich, in the telefilm Young at Heart. Dukakis' other TV movie projects include A Match Made in Heaven; Scattering Dad; A Century of Women, a six-hour miniseries for TBS; Fire in the Dark; Lucky Day, for which she received an Emmy nomination; The Last Act Is a Solo, for which she received a CableACE Award; and Sinatra, a miniseries in which Dukakis received an Emmy nomination for her portrayal of Frank Sinatra's mother. She made her debut on British television (BBC) in a made-for-TV movie, A Life for a Life, and on BBC Radio starring in Hecuba. She can currently be seen in the CBS series Center of the Universe.

For the stage, Dukakis has received two Obie Awards: for Bertolt Brecht's A Man's a Man and Christopher Durang's The Marriage of Bette and Boo at Joseph Papp's Public Theatre. Her other notable appearances at the Public include Sam Shepard's Curse of the Starving Class, Titus Andronicus, Electra and Peer Gynt. Most recently, she starred in A Mother at A.C.T., directed by Carey Perloff. Dukakis also starred in the world premiere of Timberlake Wertenbaker's Credible Witness at London's Royal Court Theatre. She made her London stage debut at the Royal National Theatre in Martin Sherman's one-woman play, Rose, to rave reviews. Dukakis then opened Rose on Broadway at the Lyceum Theatre.

As a founding member and producing artistic director of the Whole Theatre in Montclair, N.J., for 19 years, she directed and appeared in many productions. Dukakis received the coveted New Jersey Governor's Walt Whitman Creative Arts Award. She taught acting in the graduate school at New York University for 15 years and currently teaches master classes at various universities and colleges throughout the country.