A Beautiful Life
By Kevin Sessums
Allure
December, 2003
With a new baby, an Oscar on the mantel, and a laughter-filled marriage to a dashing Brit, Jennifer Connelly is coming out of her shell.
Felix the Cat's face will not stop moving. The cartoon character is silk-screened on a black T-shirt that is, on this balmy London evening, stretched across Jennifer Connelly's very active stomach. The naturally stunning actress -- 'If I have more freckles than usual, blame all this English sunshine" -- is deep into her ninth month of pregnancy. (Indeed, one week later, on August 5, she will give birth to her second son, Stellan.)
Right now, however, Stellan is hinting at a theatrical streak all his own as he readies himself for his very first entrance. "The boy's moving a lot," Connelly says, scratching Felix behind his ears. "Frankly, he was most active earlier in the day when I was getting waxed. It was shocking. I was lying on my back on the waxing table and the woman was wide-eyed at his display of acrobatics."
Connelly has been living in London while her husband, British actor Paul Bettany, films his latest movie, the romantic comedy Wimbledon, in which he stars as a dashing tennis pro opposite Kirsten Dunst. (Bettany can also be seen in Dogville with Nicole Kidman and in Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World with Russell Crowe.) The two met while filming A Beautiful Mind with Crowe two years ago and exchanged vows in the candlelit music room of the storybook Scottish estate Gilmerton House last January. "I like being married in the 1930s old-fashioned way," says Connelly, though she and Bettany wed in matching black, a morbidly modern touch that signaled that they were ready to lay to rest their lively romantic pasts. (The father of Connelly's first son, Kai, is New York City photographer David Dugan -- whom she didn't marry. She also dated musician Dweezil Zappa and actor Josh Charles, and was once engaged to actor Billy Campbell.) "I actually like going to the fish market pregnant and going home to cook, dinner for my husband," she says, having met me at the couple's favorite local restaurant, the Ark, which is a potting shed-like building tricked up with black-and-white fashion photos along the expensively fabric-covered walls.
Connelly is a graduate of the progressive private school St. Ann's in Brooklyn Heights, New York City, where she read the existentialists in the original French and studied Chinese. Instead of gushing about her favorite shoes, or the predictions of her psychic, Connelly discusses her love of poetry, naming her favorite poet (Wallace Stevens) and poem ('Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird"). What are the thirteen ways of looking at Jennifer Connelly? Her laughter -- one great whoop of delight -- shocks her freckles into a little shimmy dance on her nose. "I'm too flat and one-dimensional to come up with an answer for that," she says.
Oh, come on. Let's try.
I
She is 32 years old.
She has never been to Venice.
II
This:
"I am a sucker
For bath products."
III
Bourgeois?
"A friend of mine accuses me of it now that Paul and I have bought a nineteenth-century town house in New York," she says, as a waiter delivers her fillet of sole topped with a smattering of pesto. The Ark's owner, Louise Mayo, stops by, waving the waiter away to discuss Connelly's ripening condition. "I'm jumping up and down a lot and hoping he will come sooner," Connelly tells her. "Paul and I just want to meet the little bugger." The deeply English owner, smiling uncomfortably at the off-color term Connelly has just unwittingly employed, quickly excuses herself.
'Kai -- my other child -- is quirky in the way he thinks," Connelly, says, turning to me. "He thinks things through. Last night Paul was talking to him and said, 'You know, Kai, I think the world of you. I'd give you the world if I could.' And Kai said, 'That's nice. I don't know if I would want it. That's a lot of responsibility. You know, running all the factories!"'
"Would you let Kai be an actor if he wanted to?" I ask. Connelly smiles. "He told me he wanted to be an oceanographer. And we've talked about him becoming a political leader. Then he said, 'But all the good ones get shot.' He's showing signs of being a lefty. But he also said it was very important for him to have time away from his work to spend time with his family."
"How old is he? Forty-two?'
"He just turned six."
Connelly tells me about Kai's concern about the new baby being a boy. "He asked me what happens if the new boy does things better than he does," she says. "But the larger, better part of him is really enthusiastic. He comes up and talks to my tummy and kisses it. Heck, I get threatened too, and I'm an old ladythough in some ways I'm still a petulant little kid. I'm kind of scared of being grown-up and owning this new house.... In my old Greenwich Village apartment I had my television on the floor. I had no curtains. We don't have any furniture, so the house will be sort of camping style for a while. Paul wants a big family. He wants a kind of factory."
"Is there a difference in being an unwed mother and a wed one?" I ask. Connelly pauses and summons all her professional graciousness. "Hmmmm," she says, eyes narrowing. "Yeah, it's different. But mostly because it's just the second one. I'm much more relaxed this time. It was miraculous when Kai was born. But don't get me wrong: It hurt. Ultimately I had to have an epidural because I had an unusual delivery. This tim I'm really going to try and not have one," she says, digging into her sole. She plays with her pesto. "I think it's great fun being pregnant," she claims, the words finding their way pas the girlish pout that has suddenly appeared upon her lips. She sighs. "I've been eating a lot more mangoes than usual."
IV
A Ford model at the age of ten
That pout has been
Hawked ever since then.
V
Siblings = 0
Parents/divorced Mama's a Big Sur
Cramosacral therapist
"And my dad looks like
Robert Mitchum."
VI
"If there is something
To worry about,
I shall find it.
I am quite practiced
At giving
The Air of Being Calm."
Connelly received the Academy Award for best supporting actress in 2002 for her portrayal of the long-suffering Alicia Nash in A Beautiful Mind. It was the same year that Halle Berry won the best actress award. Connelly -- extremely thin and tranquil in Balenciaga beige -- could not have offered a more striking contrast to the voluptuous and highly emotional Berry. "You were eerily calm that night," I tell her as she gives up trying to find a comfortable position for her contorting belly here in the Ark's corner booth. "Was your mood pharmaceutically induced?"
"No, I don't do that sort of thing," she says. "Frankly, I'm shy in crowds. I don't even do well at a dinner party where there are more than a few new people.... I thought there was going to be a podium and there wasn't one. I had this fucking piece of paper and I was wondering where I was supposed to put it.... I thought I would be more like Halle. But when I get overwhelmed I get very quiet. I didn't mean to in any way indicate aloofness. I was also stressed and really tired. My addiction is running. Instead of turning to a glass of wine, I turn to that. [So] I was going to lose a bit of weight."
VII
Her favorite song --
An irony for a wineless woman --
Is Joni Mitchell's "A Case of You."
VIII
Childhood idol: Evel Knievel
IX
Screen time shared with
(a) The Hulk
(b) Several Muppets
(c) A dildo or two
(d) All of the above
The sexual apparatus (the answer: d - all of the above) was used in the infamous orgy scene at the end of Requiem for a Dream, in which Connelly's heroin-addicted character, desperate for a fix, trades her body for drugs. In an extremely disturbing scene, she and another naked actress perform for a wild-eyed throng of sleazy businessmen. Her work is brave and gut-wrenching. Yet it's difficult to understand how someone so self-possessed could act in a scene of such degradation.
"It was uncomfortable," she admits. "We had a bunch of extras who were not the most well-behaved of men. As it turned out, it wasn't the best moment on that movie set. It was a little bit of crossing the line in terms of some of their behavior.... But that was my character. It was not representative of myself. I will not put myself in a situation personally where I feel degraded.... It is an ugly tendency, to objectify women," she says.
I ask her what it's like to walk through life blessed with astounding beauty. Or is it a curse? "It brings out the voyeuristic impulse in others. It's alienating." Yet she has been posing for sexy photographs since she was a child model, and, she confesses, she is still paying the psychological price for it. "I didn't feel it at the time. But I felt it when I got older and realized I was really neurotic and had to sort myself out. I'm not saying I had to be checked into a hospital because I was insane. I say it a bit tongue-in-cheek, but still: It was an odd way to grow up."
X
She dreamt,
While modeling,
Of becoming an
Oncologist.
XI
Such somber longing
Saturates her close-ups.
"Jennifer has a certain magnetic melancholy," says Vadim Perelman, the director and screenwriter of the film adaptation of Andre Dubus III's novel House of Sand and Fog. Connelly, cast against type, portrays the slatternly recovering addict Kathy Nicolo. Sir Ben Kingsley costars as Colonel Behrani, an Iranian immigrant who, in a story of Chekhovian complexities and Grand Guignol consequences, fights for the house they both believe they own.
"We were filming the scene in which Jennifer attempts suicide inside her car," Perelman says. "The camera was right in her face. She was sobbing with a gun pointed into her mouth. Suddenly the car jerked backward because she had put it in reverse instead of park. She completely broke character. 'Oh, fuck!' she said and apologized over and over for screwing up the shot. I shouted, 'Still rolling!' She instantly put the car in park, turned away for maybe two seconds, and went right back into character and hit every emotional note. It's the take I used in the film. I think you have to be almost insane to be able to do something like that."
Roger Deakins, the cinematographer for both House of Sand and Fog and A Beautiful Mind, laughs at the memory. "Jennifer is remarkable in her professionalism," he says. "I probably see a performance at closer range than anybody on the set through my camera lens. She is as nuanced and subtle an actress as she is a person. Of course she's talented, but I work with a lot of talented people. This is the thing about Jennifer: She's kind. It was certainly difficult to make her look disheveled for this film. She has a refined quality that shines through any lighting you throw on her."
"I was surprised when they told me they had cast her as Kathy," says author Dubus. "I thought she was too, well, alluring to play the character as I had originally written her. But then I saw her work on the set, saw a few dailies, and watched as she took a free fall into her own psyche-that's the only way I can describe it. It was like watching some sort of dark orgasm. Somehow she blurred her own beauty and became that sloven working-class Italian girl."
The Iranian actress Shohreh Aghdashloo, who portrays the wife of Colonel Behrani, says, "Jennifer, like most great Stanislavskians, is able to become both the observed and the observer. I had a scene with her in which I had to have my eyes closed the whole time. I got goose bumps by the force of her very presence. It was remarkable. She is brilliant yet so humble. No entourage is needed. She is too normal for that, and much too wise."
Connelly's take on her character; "She is proud. She keeps secrets."
XII
She is
Besotted.
"You should see my husband now," Connelly says after dismissing the very notion of dessert at the end of our dinner. "He's playing an athlete in this tennis movie. So he's been in the gym and he's suntanned. He's turned into a jock. I find it a bit disconcerting. He used to be pale and have a little belly. He was my little whiskey-drinking cheese eater."
The whiskey drinker orders a vodka martini, however, as he bounds into the restaurant, fresh off the Wimbledon set, and takes a seat next to his surprised wife. A complete change comes over Connelly in his presence. The actress -- whose good manners can be mistaken for cold seriousness -- melts instantly into a gushing, glowing newlywed. Her smile will not disappear. She continuously blushes. The transformation is lovely to behold -- can a pregnant woman smolder? -- because she cannot mask it with frosty intellect. There is much kissing, much cooing, and much rubbing of her rummy.
"I miss my tummy too," says Bettany when he is told about his wife's desire for his paler, paunchier days. "It's coming back straightaway after this film. She uses it as her pillow when she watches telly.... So Charlie said he'd be the godmother," he tells Connelly. "My mate Charlie's a gay atheist," he explains to me. "I'm putting him in charge of our son's religious upbringing. I thought that was a really good idea."
Chuckling at her husband's irreverence, Connelly clasps his hand and steadies it atop her stomach. "Paul used to hang out in the trailer when I was filming House of Sand and Fog and had to do things like ... oh ... try and kill myself on the set. He'd be playing his guitar and concocting silly songs. He'd sing, 'Oh, the drama queen, the drama queen, she takes it all so seriously...' And make me laugh uproariously as I left to do my work," she says in her plumiest voice.
"That's me: the idiot in the trailer," says Bettany, ordering another vodka martini. Is their relationship based on this talent to amuse? "Right. It really has nothing to do with sex," Bettany deadpans. "We haven't had sex. This whole baby was an accident with a towel. No, no, no ... the sex is massively important," he says, leaning into the tape recorder. "Let's get that clear." He confides that he much prefers his wife with a "little meat on her bones" as opposed to the way she looked when she won the Oscar. "She had stomach muscles back then, she was so thin." Connelly's chuckles erupt.
"Jennifer is very solemn, you know," he continues. "She's quite a depressed person." He runs a thumb along the dancing freckles on her face. "There is this image of Jennifer as this ooh-la-la Wagnerian important actress. She's actually quite funny. Be funny, dear."
Connelly falls silent. She rolls her eyes. I ask if she and Bettany might ever make a film together. "Nobody wants to see a movie with real-life couples," he says, but Connelly disagrees. "I'd love to make a film with Paul," she interjects. "We would like to make one in which we are not being all lovey and gooey though."
"You'd have to do one like a Tracy/Hepburn movie where you show the love through a bit of a battle," says her husband.
"Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, for example," his wife suggests.
"Yes. We could just scream at each other."
"That would be quite fun.
"Now you're being catty," Bettany complains. "Honestly, I would love to work with Jennifer. In A Beautiful Mind I was an imaginary person so she had to look right through me ... which is how she treats me actually in real life."
Will Bettany be in the delivery room when his son arrives? "Oh, yeah. I've never seen a birth before," he says. "I'm going to be really annoying and get on my cell phone and ring up friends and go, 'We are in labor.' I'm going to stay behind her head. But there's a part of me that wants to witness it from the other point of view, to see that everyday-miracle sort of thing. I'm very cynical about all that, but I'm an actor so I'll probably get all weepy."
"I'll be going, 'Darling, film me! Film me!"' Connelly exclaims. "I can use this later in my work!"
"Yes," says Bettany. "I'll be thinking the whole time: I have to remember this feeling."
"Isn't that awful when one does that as an actor?" Connelly asks.
"I don't do that," he tells he; expertly cocking an eyebrow. "Do you do that?"
"Yes, I have to admit it."
"Well," he says, looking deep into her eyes. "You're disgusting."
Their merriment...
XIII
She giggles.
She whoops.
... fills the Ark to brimming.
