Olympia Dukakis, the veteran actress with over 200 roles to her name in stage, movie, and television production, has died. The beloved performer, perhaps best known for her Oscar-winning role in Moonstruck (1987), passed away on Saturday morning according to a Facebook post from her brother, Apollo Dukakis. No cause of death was given, but Apollo notes that Olympia had been suffering for months. She was 89 years old.
"My beloved sister, Olympia Dukakis, passed away this morning in New York City," Apollo wrote, including an image of Olympia. "After many months of failing health she is finally at peace with her Louis."
Apollo is referring to Louis Zorich, Olympia's late husband, who passed away years ago; the pair had been married since 1962 and had three children together. Zorich was also an actor who was famous for playing Burt Buchman, father of Paul Reiser's Paul Buchman, on the 1990s sitcom Mad About You.
"My beloved sister, Olympia Dukakis, passed away this morning in New York City," Apollo wrote, including an image of Olympia. "After many months of failing health she is finally at peace with her Louis."
Apollo is referring to Louis Zorich, Olympia's late husband, who passed away years ago; the pair had been married since 1962 and had three children together. Zorich was also an actor who was famous for playing Burt Buchman, father of Paul Reiser's Paul Buchman, on the 1990s sitcom Mad About You.
- 5/1/2021
- by Jeremy Dick
- MovieWeb
Beloved screen and stage actress Olympia Dukakis died May 1 at the age of 89. The news of the Oscar winner’s passing was shared by her brother, Apollo Dukakis, on Facebook. “My beloved sister, Olympia Dukakis, passed away this morning in New York City. After many months of failing health she is finally at peace and with her Louis,” Apollo wrote. Her husband, actor Louis Zorich, died in 2018 at the age of 93.
Olympia Dukakis starred in more than 130 stage productions, as well as more than 60 films and 50 television series. She won her Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress in 1988 for her role in “Moonstruck” as Rose Castorini. She won a Golden Globe for the film as well, and received Emmy Award nominations for “Lucky Day” (1991), “More Tales of the City” (1998), and “Joan of Arc” (1999). She released an autobiography, “Ask Me Again Tomorrow: A Life in Progress,” in 2003. Last year, a feature-length documentary about her life,...
Olympia Dukakis starred in more than 130 stage productions, as well as more than 60 films and 50 television series. She won her Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress in 1988 for her role in “Moonstruck” as Rose Castorini. She won a Golden Globe for the film as well, and received Emmy Award nominations for “Lucky Day” (1991), “More Tales of the City” (1998), and “Joan of Arc” (1999). She released an autobiography, “Ask Me Again Tomorrow: A Life in Progress,” in 2003. Last year, a feature-length documentary about her life,...
- 5/1/2021
- by Ryan Lattanzio
- Indiewire
Due to the Covid-19 postponement, the 2020 Summer Olympics in Tokyo, Japan will officially commence on July 23, 2021. The traditional global sports competition has been the subject of cinema dating back to Leni Riefenstahl's 1938 German propaganda documentary Olympia, which laid the groundbreaking blueprint on how contemporary sporting events are filmed for mass entertainment.
Related: Top 10 Fictional Sports Teams In Movies & TV
While many great documentaries on the Olympics have been made since the 1930s, several educational and awe-inspiring dramatic narratives about the games have also been produced. From gymnasts and track stars to skiers, ice skaters, and hockey players, a variety of sports are covered in these picks.
Related: Top 10 Fictional Sports Teams In Movies & TV
While many great documentaries on the Olympics have been made since the 1930s, several educational and awe-inspiring dramatic narratives about the games have also been produced. From gymnasts and track stars to skiers, ice skaters, and hockey players, a variety of sports are covered in these picks.
- 3/28/2021
- ScreenRant
The Academy dropped another 33 feature films into the online screening room for members of its Documentary Branch on Oct. 30, giving the Oscars doc race its biggest influx of new films to date. The branch now has 86 films to consider, with two or three more batches of films (and potentially more than 50 additional contenders) likely to be added to the field by early January.
Coming the same week that the Critics Choice Documentary Awards announced its nominees and the International Documentary Association’s Ida Documentary Awards revealed the 30-film shortlist from which it will make its final choices, the Academy move kicked the Oscar doc race into another gear in a year that promises to be highly competitive.
Among the docs that were made available to voters this week were Bryce Dallas Howard’s film about fatherhood, “Dads,” which means she’ll be competing against her father, Ron Howard, who is...
Coming the same week that the Critics Choice Documentary Awards announced its nominees and the International Documentary Association’s Ida Documentary Awards revealed the 30-film shortlist from which it will make its final choices, the Academy move kicked the Oscar doc race into another gear in a year that promises to be highly competitive.
Among the docs that were made available to voters this week were Bryce Dallas Howard’s film about fatherhood, “Dads,” which means she’ll be competing against her father, Ron Howard, who is...
- 11/2/2020
- by Steve Pond
- The Wrap
Three out of competition titles also added to programme.
Estonian film festival Tallinn Black Nights has selected 15 titles for the First Feature Competition at its hybrid 24th edition which runs November 13-29.
The festival has also added three out of competition debut films to the programme; the 18 titles in total include 10 world premieres, seven international, and one European.
Scroll down for the full list of titles
World premieres include The Translator, from Syrian filmmakers Rana Kazkaz and Anas Khalaf. Set during the 2011 Syrian revolution, it follows a political refugee living in Australia who makes the journey back to his native country,...
Estonian film festival Tallinn Black Nights has selected 15 titles for the First Feature Competition at its hybrid 24th edition which runs November 13-29.
The festival has also added three out of competition debut films to the programme; the 18 titles in total include 10 world premieres, seven international, and one European.
Scroll down for the full list of titles
World premieres include The Translator, from Syrian filmmakers Rana Kazkaz and Anas Khalaf. Set during the 2011 Syrian revolution, it follows a political refugee living in Australia who makes the journey back to his native country,...
- 10/15/2020
- by Ben Dalton
- ScreenDaily
Albert Hughes takes us on a wild journey through the movies that made him, then explains why he’s not a cinephile (Spoiler: He is). Heads up – you’re going to hear some words you’ve never heard on our show before, and only one of them is Metropolis.
Show Notes: Movies Referenced In This Episode
Gremlins (1984)
A Christmas Story (1983)
The Candidate (1972)
Menace II Society (1993)
Die Hard (1988)
Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)
Scarface (1983)
Goodfellas (1990)
Full Metal Jacket (1987)
A Clockwork Orange (1971)
Midnight Cowboy (1969)
Raging Bull (1980)
Taxi Driver (1976)
Alpha (2018)
Battleship Potemkin (1925)
Metropolis (1927)
True Romance (1993)
Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (1988)
The Matrix (1999)
Man Bites Dog (1992)
Looney Tunes: Back In Action (2003)
A Serbian Film (2010)
Scarface (1932)
The Book of Eli (2010)
The Departed (2006)
Infernal Affairs (2002)
The Godfather (1972)
Casino (1995)
JFK (1991)
Dead Presidents (1996)
Eve’s Bayou (1997)
Basic Instinct (1992)
Psycho (1960)
The Cremator (1969)
The Firemen’s Ball (1967)
Halloween (2018)
From Hell (2001)
Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992)
Hoffa (1992)
V For Vendetta (2005)
Spartacus (1960)
You Were Never Really Here...
Show Notes: Movies Referenced In This Episode
Gremlins (1984)
A Christmas Story (1983)
The Candidate (1972)
Menace II Society (1993)
Die Hard (1988)
Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)
Scarface (1983)
Goodfellas (1990)
Full Metal Jacket (1987)
A Clockwork Orange (1971)
Midnight Cowboy (1969)
Raging Bull (1980)
Taxi Driver (1976)
Alpha (2018)
Battleship Potemkin (1925)
Metropolis (1927)
True Romance (1993)
Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (1988)
The Matrix (1999)
Man Bites Dog (1992)
Looney Tunes: Back In Action (2003)
A Serbian Film (2010)
Scarface (1932)
The Book of Eli (2010)
The Departed (2006)
Infernal Affairs (2002)
The Godfather (1972)
Casino (1995)
JFK (1991)
Dead Presidents (1996)
Eve’s Bayou (1997)
Basic Instinct (1992)
Psycho (1960)
The Cremator (1969)
The Firemen’s Ball (1967)
Halloween (2018)
From Hell (2001)
Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992)
Hoffa (1992)
V For Vendetta (2005)
Spartacus (1960)
You Were Never Really Here...
- 9/29/2020
- by Kris Millsap
- Trailers from Hell
Tinto Brass's Deadly Attractions and Sinful Desires is showing September - October, 2020 on Mubi.Above: Salon KittyKnown today as a maestro of erotic cinema, Italian director Tinto Brass’s legendary status is hard-won and attributable to his dogged dedication to filming sex. There’s a whiff of aimless opportunism in his genre-hopping early career, which included flirtations with neorealism, psychedelic experimentalism, and even a spaghetti western. But in Salon Kitty (1976), his first English-language film, Brass began to consolidate and wield influences. Salon Kitty brandishes its references in plain acknowledgement of the director’s derivative tendencies, meanwhile offering glimpses of Brass-original motifs that he would later (rather ingeniously) repurpose in erotic contexts. In Salon Kitty, we can perceive the director’s artistic resolve stiffening, amounting to a film that’s greater than the sum of its cherry-picked parts. Based on the stranger-than-fiction, true story of a Berlin brothel of co-opted...
- 9/25/2020
- MUBI
When Paul Cantelon was tapped by first-time feature director Harry Mavromichalis to score “Olympia,” the documentary on Academy Award-winning actress, Olympia Dukakis, he was more than prepared to craft music that underscored her Greek heritage.
When Cantelon’s preacher father met his first-chair trumpeter mother, their family life becomes one of traveling evangelical tent meetings with Cantelon growing up on couches in different people’s homes. A number of these homes belonged to Greek families where he heard Greek music that became part of his musical lexicon. Over 30 years ago, when Cantelon met his wife, vocalist Angela McCluskey, she had a great love for Greece and took him to that country, where Cantelon was immersed in the music.
“[Mavromichalis] has a lyrical sense for picture,” says Cantelon from his Nichols Canyon home studio in Los Angeles. “He was a dancer and he has a musical, rhythmic sense to the way he shoots and edits.
When Cantelon’s preacher father met his first-chair trumpeter mother, their family life becomes one of traveling evangelical tent meetings with Cantelon growing up on couches in different people’s homes. A number of these homes belonged to Greek families where he heard Greek music that became part of his musical lexicon. Over 30 years ago, when Cantelon met his wife, vocalist Angela McCluskey, she had a great love for Greece and took him to that country, where Cantelon was immersed in the music.
“[Mavromichalis] has a lyrical sense for picture,” says Cantelon from his Nichols Canyon home studio in Los Angeles. “He was a dancer and he has a musical, rhythmic sense to the way he shoots and edits.
- 7/10/2020
- by Lily Moayeri
- Variety Film + TV
Less interesting subjects than Olympia Dukakis have been profiled in more compelling documentaries than Harry Mavromichalis’ “Olympia,” a fervently admiring but scattered and sometimes scatty portrait of a woman who is anything but. Although peppered with tantalizingly salty-mouthed anecdotes and wry observations on aging, sexuality, outsider status and the art of performance, the film is hampered by its overly fannish tone, too dazzled by the self-described “octogenarian motherf—er” to be able to meet her own forthright, iconoclastic, penetrating gaze without looking quickly away again.
A striking, blue-tinged extreme-shallow-focus closeup on Dukakis’ fantastic face, that brings out both the age lines and the luminosity of her skin, teases a much more intimate and impressionistic approach than is taken. Soon John Ryan Johnson and Federico Cesca’s photography settles into a more familiar and anonymous handheld vérité style, as we follow Dukakis from home to hotel room to car, from the...
A striking, blue-tinged extreme-shallow-focus closeup on Dukakis’ fantastic face, that brings out both the age lines and the luminosity of her skin, teases a much more intimate and impressionistic approach than is taken. Soon John Ryan Johnson and Federico Cesca’s photography settles into a more familiar and anonymous handheld vérité style, as we follow Dukakis from home to hotel room to car, from the...
- 7/10/2020
- by Jessica Kiang
- Variety Film + TV
Oh, to catch Bud Greenspan's eye and then turn up in one of his Olympic documentaries. For many athletes, from the famous to the obscure, the honor ranked just behind winning a medal.
The filmmaker, whose riveting tales soared as triumphantly as the men and women he chronicled for more than six decades, died Saturday at his home in New York City of complications from Parkinson's disease, companion Nancy Beffa said. He was 84.
"Bud was a storyteller first and foremost. He never lost his sense of wonder and he never wavered in the stories he wanted to tell, nor how he told them," she said through a family friend. "No schmalzy music, no fog machines, none of that. He wanted to show why athletes endured what they did and how they accomplished what so few people ever do."
As a 21-year-old radio reporter, Greenspan filed his first Olympic story...
The filmmaker, whose riveting tales soared as triumphantly as the men and women he chronicled for more than six decades, died Saturday at his home in New York City of complications from Parkinson's disease, companion Nancy Beffa said. He was 84.
"Bud was a storyteller first and foremost. He never lost his sense of wonder and he never wavered in the stories he wanted to tell, nor how he told them," she said through a family friend. "No schmalzy music, no fog machines, none of that. He wanted to show why athletes endured what they did and how they accomplished what so few people ever do."
As a 21-year-old radio reporter, Greenspan filed his first Olympic story...
- 12/27/2010
- by AP
- Huffington Post
Chariots Of Fire Is Top Olympics Movie
Chariots Of Fire has topped an apt new list of Olympics-related films.
The celebrated 1981 Hugh Hudson movie, starring Nigel Havers and Ben Cross, beat ice hockey sports film Miracle and Cool Runnings to top the new Access Hollywood movie poll.
The top 10 is:
1. Chariots of Fire
2. Miracle
3. Cool Runnings
4. The Cutting Edge
5.Munich
6. Prefontaine
7. Olympia
8. One Day in September
9. American Anthem
10. Blades of Glory...
The celebrated 1981 Hugh Hudson movie, starring Nigel Havers and Ben Cross, beat ice hockey sports film Miracle and Cool Runnings to top the new Access Hollywood movie poll.
The top 10 is:
1. Chariots of Fire
2. Miracle
3. Cool Runnings
4. The Cutting Edge
5.Munich
6. Prefontaine
7. Olympia
8. One Day in September
9. American Anthem
10. Blades of Glory...
- 8/18/2008
- WENN
Farrow: "Spielberg Could Become Leni Riefenstahl of Olympic Games"
Actress Mia Farrow has condemned director Steven Spielberg for aiding China's staging of the 2008 Olympic Games, warning he could become known as "the Leni Riefenstahl of the Beijing Games." Farrow, a United Nations UNICEF goodwill ambassador, launched an impassioned appeal on behalf of African victims in the over-spilling Sudan crisis earlier this month. And The Omen star, 62, is astonished so many big names and corporations like Coca-Cola and McDonald's are also readily lending their support to what they have dubbed 'The Genocide Olympics', because China openly supports the government of Sudan. She writes in a Wall Street Journal article, "That so many corporate sponsors want the world to look away from that atrocity during the games is bad enough. But equally disappointing is the decision of artists like director Steven Spielberg - who quietly visited China this month as he prepares to help stage the Olympic ceremonies - to sanitize Beijing's image. Is Mr. Spielberg, who in 1994 founded the Shoah Foundation to record the testimony of survivors of the Holocaust, aware that China is bankrolling Darfur's genocide?" Farrow went on to warn the Schindler's List director that he risked becoming a modern version of Nazi propaganda filmmaker Riefenstahl, who is famed for her 1936 Berlin games film Olympia. She writes, "Does Mr. Spielberg really want to go down in history as the Leni Riefenstahl of the Beijing Games? Do the various television sponsors around the world want to share in that shame? Because they will. Unless, of course, all of them add their singularly well-positioned voices to the growing calls for Chinese action to end the slaughter in Darfur." According to official United Nations figures, more than 200,000 people have died and more than two million have been displaced since the rebels and government forces first clashed in Dafur in 2003.
- 3/30/2007
- WENN
'Triumph of the Will' director Riefenstahl dies at 101
COLOGNE, Germany -- Leni Riefenstahl, Nazi propaganda filmmaker, groundbreaking documentarian and one of the world's most controversial directors, died Monday night in her sleep, authorities said Tuesday. She was 101. With her documentaries Triumph of the Will, about the 1934 Nazi party rally in Nuremburg, and Olympia, on the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, Riefenstahl achieved worldwide acclaim and widespread condemnation. While Riefenstahl's films were hailed as aesthetic masterpieces, critics said they glorified Adolf Hitler and his Nazi regime.
- 9/9/2003
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
Leni Riefenstahl: 1902-2003
German filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl, who gained both fame and infamy as the director of the Nazi propaganda film Triumph of the Will and other movies for the Third Reich, died Monday night at her home in Poecking, Germany; she was 101. An actress who turned to filmmaking, Riefenstahl was hand-picked by Adolf Hitler to direct a documentary of the Sixth Nazi Party Congress in Nuremberg after he saw her 1932 film The Blue Light. The resulting 1934 film, Triumph of the Will, proclaimed Riefenstahl to be a masterful, innovative filmmaker, as did Olympia, her chronicle of the 1936 Berlin Olympics. It was also her hypnotic, magisterial touch and breathtaking sense of beauty that branded both movies as the greatest propaganda films ever made, with critics saying her work glorified Hitler and showed him as a benign leader and savior of Germany. Though she received acclaim for her filmmaking genius, Riefenstahl would forever attempt to live down her association with the Third Reich, and struggled to make clear the distinctions between her aesthetic talents and the political affiliations that she documented in her work. In her defense, Riefenstahl said she had no idea of Hitler's "Final Solution" until after World War II and steadfastly maintained that Triumph of the Will contained "not one single anti-Semitic word." Despite the stigma that followed her (chronicled most effectively in the 1993 documentary The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl), she resumed filmmaking in the 1960s and continued to work well into her later years; at the age of 100 released Impressions Under Water, a film showcasing her passion for underwater photography. --Prepared by IMDb staff...
- 9/9/2003
- WENN
Jodie Foster: I Will Not Dumb Down New Nazi Flick
Actress Jodie Foster promises she will not dumb down her new movie about controversial Nazi film-maker Leni Riefenstahl. The star and director of the movie is keen to point out that she is determined not to whitewash the life and work of Hitler's favorite film-maker, who produced propaganda such as Olympiad and Triumph Of The Will. And Panic Room actress Jodie, 39, has already felt a backlash from The Jewish Defence League, who protested at the making of the film outside the gates of Paramount Studios, Los Angeles. She says, "I hope people will trust that I'm strong enough morally to know how to take on something and guide it meticulously where it has something to say. If I was going to make a movie about Hitler or Mussolini would they all be happier because it's a guy? She p***** people off because she never said she was sorry."...
- 8/3/2002
- WENN
Stone And Foster Compete For Nazi Role
Sharon Stone and Jodie Foster are competing for the role of HITLER's favorite movie-maker. The pair ate both desperate to play the lead in the story of LENI RIEFENSTAL, director of Nazi propaganda movies like Triumph of the Will (1934) and Olympia (1938). Foster has even been to visit Riefenstal who is now 97-years-old. But according to reports, the director is co-operating with German producer THOMAS SCHUHLY, who wants Sharon Stone and Oliver Stone to be involved in the biopic. A production source says, "They're hoping to beat Jodie's project to the punch and think they can do her one better."...
- 5/19/2000
- WENN
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