Olympia Dukakis, the actress, who has died aged 89, was a veteran of off-Broadway theatre largely unknown to cinema audiences until when at the age of 56, she was cast in the romantic comedy Moonstruck and won an Academy Award.

Acclaimed for a freshness and unsentimental warmth reminiscent of the golden age of Hollywood comedy, Moonstruck (1987) starred Cher as a woman falling for her fiance’s brother. As her interfering mother Rose, Dukakis, of Greek descent, made for one of cinema’s most memorable Italian-American matriarchs.

After decades of obscurity, she found herself accosted in the street by admirers who would quote the tirades she rasped at her daughter in the film — notably “What’s the matter with you, your life’s going down the toilet!”, which she had improvised on set.

While Cher won the Oscar for Best Actress, Dukakis carried off the Best Supporting Actress statuette. At the ceremony she voiced her support for her cousin Michael Dukakis, who was running as the Democratic nominee for the White House against the eventually successful George HW Bush.

With her throaty voice and mournful features that could appear either stern or long-suffering, Dukakis had long been prematurely cast as older women: her role in the film John and Mary (1969) as the mother of Dustin Hoffman, in reality only half a dozen years her junior, was typical.

After Moonstruck she was in demand as a succession of tough old broads, including Jack Lemmon’s overbearing wife in Dad (1989), Frank Sinatra’s formidable mother Dolly in the TV miniseries Sinatra (1992) and the grandmother of the baby voiced by Bruce Willis in the Look Who’s Talking comedies.

She was particularly good in Steel Magnolias (1989), holding her own against Sally Field, Shirley MacLaine, Dolly Parton and Julia Roberts in a slice of Southern small-town life, and helping to leaven the weepie storyline with another fine comic performance.

Otherwise, she was not generally impressed with the quality of the film parts she was offered and was prouder of her enduring role in the television series Tales of the City, which began in 1993.

Based on Armistead Maupin’s novels of gay life in San Francisco in the 1970s, the series earned Dukakis a Bafta nomination as Anna Madrigal, the pot-smoking, transgender landlady of an apartment building where she helps her lovelorn tenants. This ethereal but savvy earth mother was cast against type, but friends attested it was the role closest to the real Dukakis.

Olympia Mary Dukakis was born into a Greek immigrant family in Lowell, Massachusetts, on June 20, 1931. As a scholarship girl at Arlington High School she was a star athlete and was New England fencing champion three years running.

Her parents dissuaded her from pursuing an acting career and she studied physical therapy at Boston University, going on to work with polio victims all over the US.

When she was 27, however, she returned to Boston University to study acting, in defiance of her parents.  

She made her New York stage debut in The Breaking Wall (St Mark’s Playhouse, 1960) and won an Obie award for Brecht’s A Man’s a Man in 1963. Appearing in Anouilh’s Medea, she was asked to recommend a last-minute replacement for a male co-star and chose an actor called Louis Zorich, on the grounds that she found him extremely attractive; they married in 1962.

She and Zorich set up two theatrical companies, the Actors’ Company in Boston and the Whole Theater Co in New Jersey. After her husband was seriously injured in a car accident in 1977 she became the sole breadwinner for several years, teaching drama at New York University and becoming a regular in the soap opera Search for Tomorrow. “We sent our daughter through college on credit cards,” she recalled.

A role as Meryl Streep’s mother in Mike Nichols’s Heartburn (1986) looked set finally to turn her fortunes, only for all her scenes to be cut. Happily, however, Nichols cast her in a play on Broadway, where she caught the eye of Moonstruck’s director, Norman Jewison.

Her most acclaimed role in later life was that of a Holocaust survivor in Rose, a two-hour monologue written for her by Martin Sherman, which she performed in London and on Broadway.

Her autobiography, Ask Me Again Tomorrow, was published in 2003. In 2018 she was the subject of a documentary, Olympia, in which she reflected on her battles with drug use and suicidal impulses.

Zorich died in 2018; she is survived by a daughter and two sons.

Telegraph Media Group Limited [2021]