Rise to Fame
The Oscar she won for My Cousin Vinny followed her with a question mark attached. She beat Miranda Richardson, Joan Plowright, Vanessa Redgrave, and Judy Davis in 1993 as a relative unknown, and people immediately assumed Jack Palance had misread the winner's envelope. The Academy's multi-envelope process makes that physically impossible, but the rumor followed her anyway, and she spent years proving herself. Two more nominations, for In the Bedroom (2001) and The Wrestler (2008), eventually made the argument.
In the Spotlight
She's been playing Aunt May in the MCU since 2016, and the role suits her better than the casting seemed to. Robert Downey Jr. lobbied for her based on Chaplin (1992) and Only You (1994), and she repaid the favor by pushing Marvel to let May leave the apartment. That fight paid off, and May got a real arc that ends in Spider-Man: No Way Home in the character's colors. High Tide (2025) holds a 100% critics score. The actor who spent years living down a contested Oscar win has outlasted most of the people who questioned it.
Side Notes
A 2012 episode of Who Do You Think You Are? revealed that the mafia shot her great-grandfather dead in Tuscany in 1911, which tracks with her dual US-Italian citizenship and the general chaos of her Brooklyn roots. She dropped out of Boston University after one year to take a soap opera role on As the World Turns. A founding member of Naked Angels Theater Company and godmother of Zoë Kravitz, she later found out on Finding Your Roots that Julianne Moore is her distant cousin. Her family tree has more drama than most of her scripts.