After the Little Gold Man Walked Into Her Life . . .

Four years ago, in the midst of the last presidential campaign, Olympia Dukakis held up the best supporting actress trophy she’d won for “Moonstruck.” “Michael,” she yelled, “ . . . let’s go!” Her cousin, after winning the Democratic nomination, proceeded to lose the election in a landslide. Dukakis, the actress, however, has flourished since that time.

“I knew that that kind of exposure would change things,” says Dukakis, an Obie-winning theater performer who had discarded all thoughts of a film career two decades before when director Otto Preminger informed her that she was “unphotogenic.” “Winning the Oscar made me a player, a name to be considered for certain projects and parts. Standing up there, I was in a state of suspension, poised and ready for what was to come.”

The Oscar, along with a Golden Globe and awards from the New York and Los Angeles film critics, led to a new phase of her career. The offers, however, were not uniformly to her liking.

“I got lots of scripts about women of status--women who were on top of things all the time,” Dukakis recalls. “I’m more interested in characters who get buffeted, who encounter obstacles. And, since I’m a character actor, they thought of me as the last thing I’d done. I won the award for playing (Cher’s mother) Rose Castorini, so I was offered all these Italian roles.”

Dukakis’ first role after “Moonstruck” was a one-scener in “Working Girl.” “My agent didn’t think I should do it, but Mike was important to me,” she says of director Mike Nichols who, in 1986, cast her in Broadway’s “Social Security”--a play “Moonstruck” director Norman Jewison saw several times before casting her.

Other, higher-profile projects followed. The actress was cast as a fun-loving widow in the star-studded ensemble film “Steel Magnolias”; as Jack Lemmon’s overprotective wife in Gary David Goldberg’s “Dad,” and as Kirstie Alley’s zany mom in “Look Who’s Talking” and “Look Who’s Talking, Too.” This summer, Dukakis will surface as the “comic relief” in “Ruby Cairo,” a romantic adventure with Liam Neesom and Andie MacDowell. And she’s just completed what she calls her favorite role (“I’m in every frame”): a woman whose life changes when she goes to Australia to visit her daughter in “Over the Hill,” directed by George Miller (“The Man From Snowy River”).

Dukakis’ Academy Award has propelled her on the small screen as well. The role of an alcoholic mother in ABC’s “Lucky Day” snagged her an Emmy nomination. An ACE award followed her performance as an aging actress in Arts & Entertainment “The Last Act Is Solo.” In CBS’s “Fire in the Dark,” she played an older woman undergoing physical and mental deterioration. And she’s currently shooting “Sinatra: The Miniseries” for CBS, in which she plays the singer’s mother.

The actress is pursuing her stage work (in April, she’ll appear in a Cleveland production of “Mother Courage” with her daughter Christina Zorich)--always her first love. “Success has never been easy for me,” she admits. “I was pushing the Oscar away the moment I accepted it. What I finally realized is that the good, the bad, are all a part of the journey. People think of an Oscar as the culmination of your life, payment for so many sacrifices. To me, it’s less about reward than evolution.”

Dukakis’ “journey,” as she puts it, is considerably easier these days. No longer is she taking out second mortgages on the 100-year-old New Jersey home she shares with her husband Louis Zorich of CBS’ “Brooklyn Bridge” and three children. Charging her daughter’s college tuition on her credit card. Struggling to keep afloat New Jersey’s Whole Theater, where she served as artistic director. (The operation folded last year.) Teaching acting at New York University and doing ads for Aunt Millie’s spaghetti sauce to make ends meet.

For someone who worked for Equity minimum on the stage and for scale in TV and film, her post-Oscar wages represent “a significant and substantial increase.

“I can buy books without thinking twice,” the down-to-earth Dukakis observes. “ My son forced me to buy myself a house by the sea--a place on the Caribbean island of St. Maartens that I’ve named ‘Moonstruck.’ Before, I would never have spent money on something like this . . . I only dealt with necessities. Still, I’m renting it out, using it as an investment. I’m too much of a Greek--some part of me can’t do it all the way.”

Oscar or no Oscar, says Dukakis, “if I don’t work for a couple of weeks, I start thinking ‘that’s it.’ It’s ridiculous, I know . . . but these things are very ephemeral.”