2016 Sarasota Film Festival | Olympia Dukakis entertains audience at Sarasota Yacht Club

SARASOTA -- She answered questions about her film roles, her stage work and her famous co-stars. Somehow, it all kept circling around to one thing.

"There's theme for this conversation, isn't there?" Olympia Dukakis asked as she once again referenced her rough upbringing in Lowell, Mass.

"It was a textile town," she said. "There were many different ethnic groups, and our parents fought in the mills, and we fought in the streets. By the time I was 8 years old, I was very handy on the streets."

The Academy Award-winning actor was in Sarasota for an event titled "At Lunch With ... Olympia Dukakis," part of the Sarasota Film Festival. About 200 people turned out to the Sarasota Yacht Club for the event,

which featured live music from a guitar-violin duo, mimosas and a Greek-inspired lunch.

Journalist and filmmaker Regina Weinrich interviewed Dukakis during a wide-ranging half-hour conversation. It began with Dukakis' childhood.

"Who did we fight? We fought the Irish," the 84-year-old actor said with a laugh. "These are my memories of Lowell, running out of some school, hiding so I wouldn't get beaten up."

The feistiness she learned as a street kid helped her in her theater career, she said, but she had to learn to not be confrontational and to work with other people.

Throughout the conversation, Dukakis kept returning to that resiliency she picked up on the streets of her working-class hometown during the Depression.

Much of the conversation had to do with stories about her screen work, which included the Woody Allen film "Mighty Aphrodite" ("It wasn't a lot of fun," she said), "Steel Magnolias" with Shirley MacLaine, Sally Field and an almost unknown Julia Roberts; and "Moonstruck," the film that made her a movie star at age 56. "My daughter was going to college on credit cards," she said. "I was doing every TV movie I could get my hands on. My husband had been in a terrible accident and for five years he didn't work. I was hustling. It was not a pretty picture."

During the filming of "Moonstruck," director Norman Jewison predicted Dukakis would win an Academy Award for her role.

"Only out of respect, I didn't say, 'You're an idiot,' " she said. "Win an Academy Award for playing Rose? I don't think so. And it turned out that he was right."

Once her work in "Moonstruck" won her fame and an Oscar, she said, she was able to start getting paid a lot of money.

She shared some stories about co-stars.

MacLaine, she said, has had a tougher life than most people realize. MacLaine tried to talk to her about her belief in reincarnation, and about her past lives.

Dukakis said she respects everyone's spiritual beliefs, "but that doesn't mean I have to listen." She said she and MacLaine became good friends by the end of "Steel Magnolias."

After the interview, Dukakis took questions from the audience. Someone asked her about her movie "The Cemetery Club," in which she co-starred with Ellen Burstyn and Diane Ladd.

"It was not a happy set," Dukakis said. "Diane and what's her name, Ellen, did not get on well. Diane was convinced that she, Ellen, was in communication with the dark forces."

One morning during filming, she said, Ladd came to her, upset about a dream she had in which she encountered the devil. The devil had Burstyn's face.

Dukakis had praise for Cher, her "Moonstruck" co-star.

"She's a very kind person, and very sincere and very caring about the people around her," she said, "If she heard something was wrong, she was instantly there. I admired her. I admired the way she handled everything."

Dukakis said film work, after her decades of theater, felt like a foreign land.

She felt she didn't have any control over her performance because it was all in the hands of the directors and the editors.

Gradually, she said she learned how to get the people around her to accommodate her wishes. In was that same feistiness she learned in Lowell, she said, but it took a different form. "As time went on I became cleverer," she said.

"I figured out how to do what I wanted to do without confrontations. You figure out how to do that. I've become very sneaky. I don't go around punching people anymore."

Marty Clear, features writer/columnist, can be reached at 941-708-7919. Follow twitter.com/martinclear.

This story was originally published April 8, 2016 at 11:45 PM with the headline "2016 Sarasota Film Festival | Olympia Dukakis entertains audience at Sarasota Yacht Club ."