Curse of the Acting Class

Gossip columnist Hedda Hopper apparently started it all. When Luise Rainer won back-to-back Best Actress Oscars in 1937 and 1938, only to see her promising career immediately take a nose dive, Hopper referred to the chain of events as an Oscar jinx. At the time, Rainer was quoted as saying that expectations for her were so high following this double-whammy triumph that when her next film failed, she was treated as if she had never done a good film. The Oscar jinx?or Oscar curse, as it later became commonly known?has been mentioned many times over the years, allegedly affecting actors such as Louise Fletcher, Beatrice Straight, Tatum O'Neal, Lee Grant, Jo Van Fleet, Lila Kedrova, Anna Paquin, Juliette Binoche, and Gig Young. It is most often cited in the Supporting Actress category.

As Emanuel Levy points out in his book, All About Oscar, there are possibly tangible reasons why some of these careers languished that have nothing to do with mystical matters. He believes that some victims might not have been distinguished performers in the first place, with the Oscar win a bit of a fluke, and others probably suffered when their agents rushed them into a string of inferior projects for a quick cash-in on the Oscar hype, or pushed them into leading roles when perhaps they worked more effectively as supporting players. And it would be hard to advance the argument that such winners as Meryl Streep, Whoopi Goldberg, Vanessa Redgrave, Maggie Smith, and Ingrid Bergman suffered any ill effects from their victories. For those who wish to make a case that a curse exists, a good place to look is in the Supporting Actress winners of the 1990s. Following are three Oscar-winning actors we love from that period who might have been the victims of the rumored metaphysical forces. In any event, they didn't achieve the career momentum we expected.



Marisa Tomei

Brooklyn-born Marisa Tomei eventually shed her regional accent, but only after she used it to great advantage in her Oscar-winning turn as Mona Lisa Vito in My Cousin Vinny in 1992. She played a tough-talking, foul-mouthed broad, the girlfriend of an unsophisticated rookie lawyer played by Joe Pesci. Ironically her moment of glory also put her through one of the greatest indignities in Oscar history. She had competed that year against four highly revered foreign actors (Judy Davis, Joan Plowright, Vanessa Redgrave, and Miranda Richardson) and virtually all Oscar forecasters had pegged Tomei as a mere category-filler, not a serious contender. In the Los Angeles Times, Jane Galbraith called her "the off-the-wall nominee." Lo and behold, during the ceremony, Jack Palance called out Tomei's name as the winner. This was immediately followed by nasty and incessant rumors that Palance had accidentally read the wrong name, and that the Academy was too embarrassed to own up to the snafu.