It’s always interesting to see what happens to the once-popular Oscar-winning celebrities whose careers don’t take off like everyone was expecting. Some make minor headlines with their antics and spectacularly bad movies, like Cuba Gooding Jr., while others just kind of fade away, popping up occasionally at an event or premiere and reminding us that they were once destined for Hollywood greatness.

Have you heard about Helen Hunt, Mira Sorvino, or Marisa Tomei lately? Tomei has had plenty of work in the 15 years since she won an Oscar for My Cousin Vinny, but not much of it has been memorable or high-profile. She had a drop-in role in John Cusack’s current film Grace is Gone, about a man who loses his soldier wife to the Iraq war. Tomei’s scene was cut after test audiences took offense to a grieving widower having a conversation with a pretty girl. No one bothered to tell Tomei she was out of the film until she was about to show up at the premiere, though:

Oscar winner Marisa Tomei suffered a shocking humiliation when… producers of the new John Cusack movie Grace is Gone finally remembered to tell her she’d been snipped from the flick – and it could have been even worse because Tomei was told only minutes before her scheduled bow at the premiere! The star was actually en route to the screen when a staffer alerted nitwit execs that incredibly, nobody had bothered to tell her that her cameo role had been cut because of negative feedback from test audiences. In the film, Cusack loses his GI wife in Iraq and goes on a road trip to ease the pain – and while his kids are swimming in a Florida motel pool, he strikes up a conversation iwth Tomei. Test audiences objected, saying he shouldn’t be speaking to a woman so soon after his wife’s death.

[From The National Enquirer, Mike Walker’s column, December 24, 2007]

Tomei headed home and didn’t show at the premiere after she heard that she was axed, and can you blame her? How thoughtless and rude of producers not to tell her she was cut until right before the premiere.

She appeared in two other films this year, Wild Hogs and Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, which was only out in limited release but earned rave reviews. Next year Tomei is slated for War, Inc., also with John Cusack and The Night Job, which sounds like a flop to me since her costars are listed as Ray Liotta and Mickey Rourke. The film is listed as “in production,” and that is likely to mean that’s it’s delayed by the writer’s strike, which has no end in sight. What’s a struggling Oscar winner to do?

Marisa Tomei is shown at the DKNy Delicious launch party on 11/7/07, thanks to PRPhotos.