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And Baby Makes Four
By Mark Seal
American Way
June 15, 2005
Jennifer Connelly plays a frightened young mother in the psychological thriller Dark Water. But this real-life young mother and her six-year-old son found different kinds of thrills in the parks and museums (and hospitals) of London.
It's the hour of night when telemarketers, not Oscar winners, are usually calling me. But these days, Jennifer Connelly is as much mother as movie star, and she's just put her two-year-old son to bed.
"Hi, is this Mark?" she asks. "I'm sorry to be so late calling you, but he was fighting me and fighting me."
"He," of course, is her son, and how the boy came to be born in London was an adventure of sorts, set in the Royal City and starring Jennifer Connelly in a way much different than you'd expect.
When Connelly left her longtime hometown of Brooklyn to move to London for three months in the summer of 2003, she was six months pregnant, arriving not to star in a movie but to support her husband, the British actor Paul Bettany, who was filming Wimbledon at the mother church of international tennis outside of the city. Along with her six-year-old son, Kai, they rented a house in Notting Hill Gate and settled in for the shoot, the culmination of which produced not only a movie, but also their newborn son.
"Paul had some days off, but he worked almost every day, first thing in the morning until evening," Connelly says. So she was left with her precocious six-year-old "and my massive belly."
That's when the adventures began.
Next month, Connelly plays a young mother in Dark Water, an edgy psychological thriller in which her big eyes widen over all manner of horror in a very strange apartment. But she didn't have time to be spooked by her London digs. She was rarely there.
"I think London is such a great city with kids," she says. "There's so much to do! You could do a whole kids' issue."
Most every morning, Paul was out the door, leaving Connelly and Kai with an extraordinary city to explore. If they were feeling lazy, which they rarely were, they only needed to cross a few streets and they were in the Princess Diana Memorial Playground. "Fantastic," she says. "It's in Hyde Park, sort of up by Kensington Palace. It has this massive pirate ship that's sort of plunked down in the middle of this sand pit. The whole thing is beautifully landscaped. There are these little wooden boats and climbing structures and plants and big musical instruments that the kids can play on. It's really kind of magical."
Kai loved that park, but not every day. He was six going on 16. "Quite precocious, which a lot of these city kids are," Connelly says. "He's playing Sebastian in their school version of Twelfth Night now. So they're studying Shakespeare. They'd already read some Shakespeare by the time we were there. He has a good sense of history, so he really enjoyed seeing the architecture of London and the little higgledy-piggledy streets and cars. And the cabs.
"Oh, yeah, Kai loves the cabs," she says. "All kids love the cabs. I love the cabs."
She'd let Kai hail one, and they'd fall into the back of a black London cab, its elegant interior big as a Buick, steered by the world's best cabdrivers. "They take their jobs really seriously and really have a thorough knowledge of the streets, which is really an accomplishment," she says.
"Where to, sir?" the cabbie would ask Kai and his mother.
Most often they'd direct the cab to a museum, because London has more museums than any city on earth. Connelly recites a litany: the Science Museum, "my favorite science museum, massive and really well-done"; the Victoria and Albert Museum, "which does programs for kids where they give you a digital camera and they let you walk around the museum taking pictures of sculptures. Then you come back and you find the sculpture that you want to transform yourself into, and they have this arts and crafts area where you make yourself look like the sculpture."
But frequently, Kai leaned more toward cannons than culture. "The Imperial War Museum," she says. "When you walk in, they've got old planes and memorabilia from the wars: posters and uniforms and swords, history of all the different wars. There's one area you go through and they have bunkers and trenches simulated with sounds piped in, air raid sirens in other parts."
They gazed upon superstars and royalty at the renowned house of wax,
Madame Tussauds, and its adjoining Planetarium, but left in a rush after one look at its Chamber of Horrors and its grim catalog of crime and punishment. "In the basement, they have a torture-chamber thing going on. We started to walk down the stairs and we both got entirely freaked out, and we left. Oh, I think they sort of simulate torture. I don't really know. It's a little horrific."
But both mother and son absolutely adored Hampton Court Palace, the almost-200-year-old, palatial country residence of the late Cardinal Wolsey, all-powerful archbishop of York. It's a universe unto itself with gardens and galleries, a palace, and a moat. "We ran through the maze in the garden," Connelly remembers. "It's a beautiful, beautiful place. You can't see it all in one day. I think we went there twice. I do remember Kai being very impressed with Hampton Court. When we were walking around there, he said to me, 'Mom, I think I know what I'm going to be when I grow up.' "
"What?" Connelly asked.
"A man of leisure," he said.
Kid-friendly London is something of a Connelly family tradition. At 14, the actress went to the Royal City with her mother to film the 1986 movie Labyrinth, costarring David Bowie, and her memories remain indelible. "I was there for five months for that," she says. "I remember we stayed in a house in Hampstead, which I still love, in a little cul de sac of houses in Hampstead Heath, which is a big park. I just loved our house, the park, the swimming ponds, and I thought London was just a beautiful, beautiful city." Connelly regularly returned to London for short trips as her star rose in Hollywood.
Then she fell in love with an Englishman, Paul Bettany, who was born in London. His maternal grandmother was an actress, as were his mother and father, who served in the Royal Navy. Bettany was classically trained at London's prestigious Drama Centre before graduating to local stage, TV and film. He and Connelly met on the set of A Beautiful Mind, for which Connelly won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for her role opposite Russell Crowe as Alicia Nash, the wife of schizophrenic mathematician John Forbes Nash Jr. Bettany played Nash's imaginary Princeton roommate.
"Did Paul show you his London?" I ask.
Of course he did, she says, and names some adult-oriented hot spots of the city. She adores Claridge's, the venerable art deco landmark hotel in posh and proper Mayfair, whose every glamorous inch is a 1920s fantasy. They love breakfasts at the Electric Brasserie -- "a private-club kind of place right off Portobello Road where you sit on couches, kind of a loungy atmosphere with a movie theater attached" -- and dinners at the theater district landmark the Ivy or its sister seafood restaurant, J. Sheekey, see-and-be-seen places with solidly phenomenal English food. On one of their first visits, Bettany took her to the Cotswolds, where he introduced her to friends and relatives, and they stayed in "houses in the country, where the houses have names." They were married on New Year's Day 2003 in a very private and British affair at a manor house in Scotland called Gilmartin, where, surely, Connelly's favorite song, Joni Mitchell's "A Case of You," wafted in the breeze.
"The people who own it, the baron and baroness, they rent it out, and they run the place," she says. "The most extraordinary meals and really lovely people. It was this big rambling stone estate, not quite a castle. That's what I find astounding as well: The castles still exist! That you can visit and stay in. It's such an amazing thing that European children grow up seeing this!"
A dedicated and dexterous sportswoman, Connelly loves running through Hyde Park, the greenbelt in the middle of the city. But in the summer of 2003, the London of nightclubs, fancy dinners, and jogging was very far away. "I didn't do too much running this last trip, being pregnant," she says. But she was always hungry, as was Kai. "I hear people say, 'Oh, London, the food's horrible,' but it's so untrue," she says. Sometimes, she and Kai would walk the streets and discover places whose names they never even knew. "I enjoyed walking around, being pregnant. We'd just try places in different neighborhoods. Primrose Hill. Notting Hill. Bunch of great restaurants in Notting Hill."
But there was one restaurant name Kai could never forget: Nobu. "Kai really likes Japanese food," says Connelly. "It's big, and it's in the Metropolitan hotel. You walk in and there's a big bar and people hanging about. To Kai, it's a superfancy sushi restaurant, really special. He likes rolls with extra ginger. No wasabi, extra ginger."
After lunch, they were on the run again, sometimes to Hampstead Heath, where Connelly lived when she was 14.
"They have great swimming ponds," she says. "They were having an unprecedented heat wave. One hundred and eight degrees. I was trying to sneak Kai into the Women's Pond. But it didn't work. It's definitely for women only. I thought, 'Women and six-year-old boys.' But it's definitely a place to go back to, really great. There's a Women's Pond, a Men's Pond, a Mixed Pond."
Despite his mother's best efforts on his behalf, Kai was more interested in exploring than swimming. I can see him tugging at her arm and leading her back into a cab, directing the driver to take them straight to the Tower of London, the 900-year-old edifice that no six-year-old (or 60-year-old) can resist. "Kai loved it," she says. "It's not just all tower. It has a moat around it and turrets and different towers. There's the collection of crown jewels and it has armor. Then, in the fields outside, they do jousting and re-enact sword fighting."
She is re-enacting her three months in London now, reeling off place after place that she and Kai visited: the Tate Modern, which she calls "awe-inspiring"; rowing in a wooden skiff on the Thames River in Richmond in West London, where she and Kai would pass Eel Pie Island (Henry VIII used to stop there for lunch while hunting) before rowing up to a pub for a lunch of their own; Legoland, near Windsor Castle, "a big hit"; the fish market, "I did lots of cooking"; Buckingham Palace ... all of the landmarks of what she calls the "heartbreakingly beautiful city." The only thing she didn't get to do that trip was to take Kai to Paris via the Chunnel. "It's just a wonderful thing to be able to do, and I kept wanting to, but didn't get around to it," she says.
Then, almost three months were gone, and her husband had a rare day off. So Connelly, Bettany, Kai, and some friends walked miles through Hyde Park, attending a crazy only-in-London event called Red Bull Flugtag. It was, she says, "a competition where people built these flying machines that went off this ramp, and they would see how high the machines could fly before crashing into the water. The most absurd thing. But I think we walked miles and miles in the heat, with these massive crowds. It was so crowded, you could hardly get close enough to see what was going on. I do remember we walked practically all the way across the park in this heat wave."
The next day, Connelly went into labor.
She checked into a birthing center just down the way from Abbey Road, where the Beatles had offices and a recording studio, and where they were photographed walking across the famous crosswalk for the cover of their album Abbey Road. Bettany, Connelly, and Kai found themselves crossing that famous striped crosswalk again and again. "I was in labor, sort of trying to make things go quicker, walking down Abbey Road, taking a break from the birthing center," she says, laughing at the improbability of it all. "As a huge Beatles fan, I mean, Abbey Road! Pacing, fretting, worrying. But very much entertained in the meanwhile. I'm not sure you're allowed to go into the studio, and we didn't really try. But just seeing that street sign and that sidewalk was quite cool."
The baby was born on August 5, 2003. Within a day, the family was back at what had become their favorite restaurant, an unassuming place whose interior resembles a ship, called the Ark. "It's right off Kensington High Street, literally across the street and about five doors down from where we were staying," she says. "It's a really sweet little Italian restaurant, and we used to go, I kid you not, probably three times a week. We used to go so much that when our baby was first born, we went back to the house and Paul had him in one of those slings, a baby carrier, sort of nestled. It was summertime. It was really hot. Paul had no shirt on, and he had the baby in the sling and he was barefoot, and he said, 'I have to go show the guys in the Ark!' I said, 'Honey, you're barefoot!' And he said, 'I know! I know! I'm just going to go down and show them.' And he went down barefoot to show them, because we'd been there so often."
They named their baby Stellan, in honor of Paul's actor friend Stellan Skarsgård. It was the perfect name for an already extremely cosmopolitan kid who had experienced most of London before he was even born.
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