Marisa Tomei was more than reluctant to shed her locks for 1994 film “Only You.”
Tomei, who plays a hopeless romantic determined to find her soulmate, a man identified by her Ouija board when she was a teen, had a major fashion moment onscreen with a stylish bob haircut, starting a trend upon the film’s release in 1994. Robert Downey Jr., Bonnie Hunt, and Billy Zane co-star in the beloved rom-com.
Emmy-winning costume designer Nicoletta Ercole, who also worked on fellow Italy-set productions like “Letters to Juliet,” “Under the Tuscan Sun,” and “My House in Umbria,” recently told IndieWire that Tomei had to be convinced to change up her style.
“Marisa, at the beginning, she arrived right after she won [the Oscar] for ‘My Cousin Vinny.’ She had very long hair,” Ercole explained. “I said, ‘Why can’t you cut it? Like this, it’s normal. It’s nothing special.’”
She continued, “Marisa, she’s not … she’s so beautiful but she’s not particularly beautiful, you know what I mean? Like everybody else. So I said, ‘Why don’t you cut your hair?’ And she said, ‘No! I don’t want to cut my hair!’ I told her, ‘OK, I know the best hairstylist in the world, Aldo Signoretti. He’s in Rome. If you want, I can call him.’ So I talked with the producer and asked production if we could cut her hair. The hairstylist has now [been nominated for] Oscars. He made ‘Moulin Rouge!,’ he made ‘Apocalypto.’ So I called him and said, ‘Go to an airport, get the first flight to L.A. You need to come here to cut the hair of Marisa Tomei.’ He cut her hair in the little garden at my apartment.”
Ercole added that her favorite designs from the film were the red shoes that Tomei wears when she first meets Downey’s character in a “Cinderella”-esque moment. “I made those shoes,” Ercole said, citing that she crafted every piece of clothing onscreen. “I have the drawings, I still have the sketches from ‘Only You.’”
The Emmy winner continued that American productions in Italy, much like “Only You,” have to grapple with accepting the modern stylings of the romantic country.
“When the Americans come here, they think we are stuck in the period of Fellini,” Ercole said. “During the shooting of ‘Only You,’ they asked me, ‘I would like to have some nuns.’ I said, ‘Of course. Which do you prefer: gray nuns, do you want black nuns, light blue?’ ‘No, I want all white with a big hat.’ But that doesn’t exist anymore. It’s a mistake for me! ‘I don’t care, I want that.’ It all depends on the director.”
“Only You” was directed by Norman Jewison and written by Diane Drake. Jewison told Entertainment Weekly at the time that while Tomei’s look, especially the bobbed haircut, was reminiscent of Audrey Hepburn in “Roman Holiday,” the parallel was not intentional despite Jewison saying Tomei “has the neck for” the shorter hairstyle.
