Marisa Tomei

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Marisa Tomei walked onto the stage of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion on the 29th of March, 1993, and heard her name called as the winner of the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. She had beaten out Miranda Richardson, Joan Plowright, Vanessa Redgrave, and Judy Davis. Within days, a rumor spread through Hollywood that the wrong name had been read aloud. It was a story designed to diminish. But it did not stick. What stayed was the performance itself: a fast-talking, Brooklyn-accented auto mechanic named Mona Lisa Vito who knew more about tire treads than any lawyer in the room. That character launched one of the most durable careers in American film. How did a kid from Midwood, Brooklyn, with one line in her debut film, become the actress who would rack up three Oscar nominations across three decades? And what does her unlikely arc say about the kinds of women Hollywood is willing to see?

• 2. Brooklyn Roots

  ›

  Gary Tomei was a trial lawyer, and Adelaide Tomei was an English teacher, and together they took their daughter to Broadway shows from an early age. Marisa Tomei was born on the 4th of December, 1964, into a family where both parents traced their ancestry to Italy. Her father's family came from Tuscany, Calabria, and Campania; her mother's from Tuscany and Sicily. She grew up in the Midwood neighborhood of Brooklyn, the kind of place where the theater felt like something just out of reach and therefore more desirable for it. At Andries Hudde Junior High School, she played Hedy LaRue in a school production of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. She also attended the Albee School of Dance. After graduating from Edward R. Murrow High School in 1982, she spent a year at Boston University before following the pull toward performance full time. Her younger brother Adam Tomei also became an actor, suggesting the family home was one where the stage felt like a reasonable destination.

• 3. Learning the Craft

  ›

  Tomei's first screen credit came in 1984, in the comedy film The Flamingo Kid. She played a waitress named Mandy and had exactly one line. Two years later she appeared in Playing for Keeps, a film directed by Bob and Harvey Weinstein that was a financial and critical failure. Neither film offered much. The stage was where things started to open up. In 1987, at the age of 22, she made her off-Broadway debut in Daughters, playing a character named Cetta. The reviews were strong enough to earn her the Theatre World Award for outstanding debut. She kept working in off-Broadway productions through the late 1980s: Beirut in 1987, Sharon and Billy in 1988, What the Butler Saw in 1989. She also joined the Naked Angels Theater Company as a founding member, a group that became a serious artistic home. On television, she landed a main role in the first season of the sitcom A Different World in 1987, playing Maggie Lauten. It was a steady platform at a time when she was still figuring out where she fit. One of her costars on that show was Lisa Bonet, whose daughter Zoë Kravitz Tomei would later become godmother to.

• 4. Mona Lisa Vito

  ›

  My Cousin Vinny opened in 1992 and gave Tomei the role that changed everything. She played Mona Lisa Vito opposite Joe Pesci, and critic Vincent Canby wrote that she gave "every indication of being a fine comedian, whether towering over Mr. Pesci and trying to look small, or arguing about a leaky faucet in terms that demonstrate her knowledge of plumbing." Canby added that Mona Lisa was "a first-rate auto mechanic, which comes in handy in the untying of the knotted story." The Academy agreed. At the 1993 ceremony, Tomei took the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress. Then came Rex Reed, the American film critic, who suggested publicly that presenter Jack Palance had read the wrong name from the envelope. The Academy officially denied the claim. A Price Waterhouse accountant explained that if such a mistake had occurred, "we have an agreement with the Academy that one of us would step on stage, introduce ourselves, and say the presenter misspoke." Tomei described the story as "extremely hurtful." It persisted anyway, as Hollywood myths tend to do. The matter was settled as definitively as it could be in 2015, when The Hollywood Reporter polled hundreds of Academy members and asked them to re-vote on past decisions. Given a second chance, members said they would still award the 1992 Best Supporting Actress to Tomei.

• 5. The Range Question

  ›

  After the Oscar, Tomei appeared as silent film star Mabel Normand in Chaplin, alongside her then-boyfriend Robert Downey Jr., who played Charlie Chaplin. The romantic drama Untamed Heart with Christian Slater followed; Tomei and Slater won the MTV Movie Award for Best Kiss. She appeared in The Paper in 1994 and in Only You alongside Downey again. In Nick Cassavetes' Unhook the Stars, Stephen Holden of The New York Times compared her favorably to the film's lead, Gena Rowlands, describing her character's "raw working-class feistiness and bluntly profane vocabulary." That performance earned Tomei her first Screen Actors Guild nomination. But it was 1998's Slums of Beverly Hills, a Tamara Jenkins independent film, that offered a subtler register. Janet Maslin of The New York Times called her "very charming and funny," while Emanuel Levy of Variety described her as "more subdued than she usually is." The range question was already being asked. She could do broad comedy and she could do quiet. Broadway arrived the same year: she made her debut at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre in the Frederick Knott play Wait Until Dark, opposite Quentin Tarantino. Ben Brantley of The New York Times compared her unfavorably to Audrey Hepburn, who had played the same role in the 1967 film, writing that Tomei was "a fine, vibrant actress" but not well cast. Matt Wolf of Variety offered a milder verdict: "a likable, if not wildly interesting performance."

• 6. Second and Third Acts

  ›

  Todd Field's In the Bedroom arrived in 2001, and with it a second Academy Award nomination. Variety wrote that Tomei gave "her most naturalistic and unaffected performance," while Stephen Holden of The New York Times called the character "easily her finest screen role." Darren Aronofsky's The Wrestler in 2008 pushed further. Tomei played Cassidy, a struggling stripper, and appeared in several nude scenes. Aronofsky said, "This role shows how courageous and brave Marisa is. And ultimately she's really sexy." The Hollywood Reporter called it "one of her most arresting performances, again without any trace of vanity." Ty Burr of The Boston Globe wrote that Tomei's performance was "most naked when Pam has her clothes on." The Wrestler brought a third Oscar nomination, alongside a first BAFTA nomination and a second Golden Globe nomination. Between those two dramatic peaks, she had also appeared in commercial hits. The comedy Anger Management in 2003 starred Jack Nicholson and Adam Sandler. Wild Hogs in 2007 was the 13th-highest-grossing film of its year domestically. Sidney Lumet's Before the Devil Knows You're Dead that same year starred Philip Seymour Hoffman and Ethan Hawke. The range question had been answered in practice if not always in the press.

• 7. Aunt May and the Stage

  ›

  From 2016 to 2021, Tomei played Aunt May Parker in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, appearing in Captain America: Civil War, Spider-Man: Homecoming, Avengers: Endgame, Spider-Man: Far From Home, and Spider-Man: No Way Home. The casting placed her inside the largest franchise in cinema, alongside a global audience that had not necessarily followed her earlier work. The theater had never stopped. She earned a Drama Desk Award nomination for her role in Top Girls in 2008. Will Eno's The Realistic Joneses in 2014 brought her a special Drama Desk Award; Charles Isherwood of The New York Times wrote that she "radiates chipper energy" and carries "an air of desperate cheeriness that keeps faltering, like a sparkler sputtering in the dark." In 2019, she returned to Broadway in a revival of The Rose Tattoo at the American Airlines Theatre, reprising the role of Serafina Delle Rose that she had first played at the Williamstown Theatre Festival years earlier. Alexis Soloski of The Guardian wrote that Tomei is "a lighter, flightier presence -- sensuous and delightful." The genealogical program Who Do You Think You Are? took her to Tuscany and to the island of Elba in 2012 to investigate a 100-year-old murder: the killing of her great-grandfather, Francesco Leopoldo Bianchi. In 2023, she appeared in Rebecca Miller's romantic comedy She Came to Me opposite Peter Dinklage and Anne Hathaway, which premiered at the 73rd Berlin International Film Festival.