Actress Finds One’s Person’s Trashy Is Another One’s Treasure : Movies: Marisa Tomei, who stars with Joe Pesci in ‘My Cousin Vinny,’ has won praise for her portrayal of a less-than-genteel Brooklynite.

Marisa Tomei is trying to master a Minnesota accent, with a little help from humorist Howard Mohr’s “How to Talk Minnesotan” and Garrison Keillor’s “Lake Wobegon Days.”

The books sit on a table in her Minneapolis hotel room, which is home during production of “The Baboon Heart.” In this Tony Bill film, co-starring Christian Slater, Tomei plays a good-hearted waitress in a Minneapolis coffee shop.

Tomei speaks a couple of nasally sentences in what is supposed to be Middle America speak. “What do ya think?” she asks. Actually, it’s not bad, for a girl from Flatbush.

The accent in Tomei’s last role came a little more naturally: She plays the spunky, funky Brooklynite Mona Lisa Vito in the courtroom comedy “My Cousin Vinny,” appearing as Joe Pesci’s long-suffering fiancee who rides shotgun in an old Caddy to rural Alabama, her wildly tacky Spandex wardrobe in tow. Tomei’s performance has generated praise from movie critics nationwide.

“Tomei is so good at playing this svelte sharpie that she commandeers the screen whenever she’s around,” writes The Times’ Peter Rainer.

Tomei “gives 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,” says the New York Times’ Vincent Canby.

For Newsday’s Jack Mathews, “. . . The big news in this wonderfully tasteless and lowbrow courtroom farce is that Pesci’s performance is not even the best thing about it. That honor goes to former soap opera star and stage actress Marisa Tomei, who very nearly blows Pesci off the screen as Vinny’s chicly trashy fiancee . . . “

In describing Mona Lisa, Tomei says: “She’s got a lot of sides that don’t exclude each other--fashion victim, really down to earth, but really sensitive to (her man’s) needs and always standing by him.”

Tomei acknowledges that until the recent release of “My Cousin Vinny,” few people had heard of her. Her first film role of any consequence was that of a mobster’s daughter in the forgettable “Oscar,” starring Sylvester Stallone.

“Yeah, well, ‘Oscar’ really broke the ice, and I was chipping away at that ice for some time,” Tomei says, hugging her knees and pushing her feet under the couch cushions. Tomei is wearing faded, baggy jeans and a stretchy top with a perfect application of makeup on what looks to be porcelain skin.

Petite and as graceful as a dancer, Tomei moves easily across the room, holding an Evian bottle, and talks about her role in “The Baboon Heart.” The love story in the film revolves around Tomei’s relationship with a silent busboy she never much noticed at work, until he rescues her from an assault one night.

“It’s really about losing your picture of who you’re supposed to be with and allowing yourself to fall in love with, really, the right person who might be right under your nose,” she says.

“I mean, we all get our picture from the movies, and this is about taking a risk, taking a chance and discovering life anew.”

She also appears in the upcoming “Equinox,” a film by Alan Rudolph, with Matthew Modine and Fred Ward. And she has a small part as silent screen star Mabel Normand in Richard Attenborough’s yet-to-be-released “Charlie,” the biographical Charlie Chaplin film.

So, yes, she’s been busy. And she wants to stay that way. Tomei, who has always been referred to as “twentysomething” in the press, won’t reveal her age for fear of missing out on a role. “It’s not because I’m trying to be rude, but it’s just to keep me working longer. It’s just so people won’t have a subconscious idea of how old I am and then say, ‘She can’t play that part.’ ”

The daughter of an attorney and a schoolteacher, Tomei landed her first acting job in college, partly to avoid a summer job arranged by her father. “He had some very boring job lined up for me, so I got my pictures together and I tried to take a stab at it, and that summer I got a part in ‘The Flamingo Kid.’ It was only a line, but it was a start.”

While debating whether to return to Boston University, she auditioned for and was cast in “As the World Turns.”

“She was white trash,” she says of her character and laughs. “It was like everybody in the soap opera is having these love affairs, wearing these gowns and ridiculous hair and everything and she just had, like, a corduroy vest that I wore every day. . . . She couldn’t get a date, went crazy, fell in love with her best friend’s father who was 60. You know, the normal soap opera tribulations.”

Tomei quickly gravitated to the theater. She was awarded Los Angeles’ 1987 Drama-Logue Award for best actress for her performance in “Beirut,” and won the 1986 Theatre World Award for best new performance in the Off-Broadway “Daughters.”

And there was a stint on the NBC-TV series “A Different World,” playing Lisa Bonet’s oddball roommate; but television has never been her goal.

Tomei is an avid member of New York’s Naked Angels theater company, an ensemble of actors and writers that develops and presents new plays off-off Broadway. Pippin Parker, a writer, director and the group’s founder, worked with Tomei in “Aven’u Boys.” Tomei played a neighborhood “tramp” who got pregnant.

“It was not a glamorous role at all,” says Parker. “It was an extremely difficult role. She’s a real workhorse. She loves to work, and she’s very specific, constantly challenging everyone to get to the truth of every single scene.”

The group has tackled “issues projects” including political amnesty and the environment, the latter a personal interest of Tomei’s. “It’s a way to have theater be pertinent and stir people again about what’s happening in today’s society.”

Regardless of what she’s working in, she says she’s a stickler for details. In “My Cousin Vinny,” Tomei knew exactly what type of clothes her character would wear, and she was determined to find them. It wasn’t easy tracking down the clingy wardrobe she describes as, “Nothing short of a second skin. We went to a lot of malls.”

As a relative newcomer to the big screen, Tomei says she’s still feeling her way. With film, “it’s all out of sequence,” she says. “It’s a different medium. I’m using different tools. It’s scary but it’s mostly exciting. I just have to be fearless about it.”

She doesn’t know what will happen after “The Baboon Heart.”

“I’m just starting, and I believe in dreaming big. . . . Now’s the time when I can just begin to start to zero in. (“Vinny”) just came out. If it does good maybe I’ll get to do something, and what that will be, I haven’t gotten to that step yet.”

“My Cousin Vinny” is at selected theaters throughout Orange County. See the Orange County Movie Guide, F3, for screening times.