While many audiences these days know Marisa Tomei as the newest Aunt May to Tom Holland’s Peter Parker in the current “Spider-Man” films, the actress has had a long and successful career in Hollywood. Tomei got her start in soap operas when she starred as Marcy Thompson on “As The World Turns.” Her Oscar win for best supporting actress following her role in “My Cousin Vinny” was huge, and many believed it would set Tomei up for a long, successful career.
Truthfully, that has been the case. While Tomei has recently expressed regret over the current direction of her career, telling Collider that she “regrets” taking on roles that are maternal in nature, it’s hard to argue that she hasn’t enjoyed a level of success that many actors and actresses only dream of.
Tomei has also often captured public interest for the fact that she’s often expressed having no interest in being married or having children, instead focusing on her career and making work her “life force” (per Closer Weekly). Here’s a glimpse at the transition one of Hollywood’s greatest has gone through, from co-starring with real-life roommate Lisa Bonet to her time as Marvel’s Aunt May.
Maria Tomei began training as an actor from a young age
Marisa Tomei was born in Brooklyn, New York City. She got into acting early, telling RoundAbout Theatre that her technical training included plenty of non-acting sources and inspirations, including “literature, feminist studies, spiritual texts” and tap dancing. Tomei also mentioned that she regularly works with fellow actress Kate McGregor-Stewart, whom she met in her early 20s when she was just starting out as an actor. The relationship has had an invaluable impact on Tomei’s career. She says the two have “had a life long relationship of pondering plays and movie scripts and laughing and learning together.”
Things really kicked off for Tomei as an actress when she made the decision to drop out of college and pursue acting full time. She told NPR in 2010 that while most people associate her first role with her time on the soap opera “As The World Turns,” she actually earned a small part in the movie “The Flamingo Kid” first. As she explained, she filmed “The Flamingo Kid” in the summer between classes and then asked her parents what she should do.
Tomei says, “I talked with my parents about it, and my mom … said stay in school, and my father said, take this chance. And so I took the chance.” Obviously, it worked out well for her.
As fans of “A Different World” know, Marisa Tomei co-starred alongside Lisa Bonet on the show. Their characters were roommates on the show, and it turns out the arrangement mirrored their real-life living situation. As IMDb notes, they lived together off-set as well. It turns out the twosome really hit it off, and Tomei is godmother to all three of Bonet’s children (per PopSugar).
Both Bonet and Tomei eventually left the show, though for very different reasons. As actress Dawnn Lewis told Vanity Fair, while Bonet’s departure was personal (the actress was pregnant with her first daughter, Zoe Kravitz, and show creators didn’t want to write the pregnancy in), Tomei was asked to leave after the show shifted direction. Lewis said that the show’s creators “wanted to go in a different direction culturally, which meant Marisa was also gone. She and Lisa are incredible women, and they were so much fun to work with. It was sad for me — because we had started this journey together — for them to not be there anymore.”
Whatever might have happened behind the scenes, it’s clear that Tomei has a lot of fond memories of the show. Tomei admitted to HipHollywood that filming the show was “one of the most fun times in my life.”
Her big break was My Cousin Vinny
When Marisa Tomei landed the role of Mona Lisa Vito in 1992’s “My Cousin Vinny,” it’s likely that she didn’t realize doing so would also land her an Academy Award. While chatting with The Guardian in 2017, Tomei marveled at the fact that 25 years had elapsed between when she filmed the movie and the interview, and then shed a little light on how she got the role.
Tomei explained, “It’s such a funny movie and it really holds up. I was fresh to the business and didn’t know how movies worked but Joe [Pesci] chose me for the part, then took me by the hand and guided me immensely, so I got very lucky.” She added that she even keeps her Oscar for best supporting actress at home in her library.
Since that win, Tomei has been nominated for the same award twice more. She told the publication that it often feels like she is “a leading actress caught in a supporting actress vortex,” implying that she certainly believes she has the acting chops for weightier roles. It’s certainly easy to see why she feels that way; as The Guardian notes, Tomei followed up her Oscar win with “a string of middling ’90s comedy-dramas” such as “Only You,” “Slums of Beverly HIlls,” and “What Women Want.”
