Over the weekend, Olympia Dukakis — Oscar winner, Golden Globe winner, director, activist and Lowell native — passed away at the age of 89. In 2013, Executive Arts Editor Jared Bowen sat down with Dukakis for Open Studio as she prepared for a role in Shakespeare and Company’s Mother Courage and Her Children in Lenox, MA, a role she first played 50 years prior. The experience was a family affair, as she co-starred with her brother Apollo.
Dukakis let Bowen in on what kept her motivated throughout her long, formidable career: the audience. “That to me is the whole thing,” she said. “There’s a wonderful poem by [Federico Garcia] Lorca. It goes, ‘the poem, the song, the picture is water drawn from the well of the peoples, and should be given back to them in a cup of beauty, so that in drinking, they will know themselves.’ And that says it.”
