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Actress Awakens
The Cincinnati Post
March 22, 2002
As Jennifer Connelly talks about ''A Beautiful Mind,'' she credits ''Waking the Dead'' with shaking her career to life.
That 2000 movie ''marks the beginning of this chapter'' in which she's snagging challenging roles in interesting movies.
Ms. Connelly went on to play the painter's mistress in ''Pollock'' and a junkie in ''Requiem for a Dream.''
Then she convinced director Ron Howard that she could hold her own in ''A Beautiful Mind,'' the biopic about Nobel Prize-winning schizophrenic John Forbes Nash Jr. and his wife, Alicia.
So after nearly two decades of mostly B(ad)-movies, the 31-year-old actress is culminating her run of fine performances by collecting an armful of awards.
She already has a Golden Globe and a British Oscar, and she's the odds-on favorite to win the supporting-actress Oscar come Sunday.
She says she realized about four years ago that something had to change in her career. ''I found myself looking at the movies that I like to watch, and the movies that I had done, and they weren't the same kinds of films,'' she says.
Her decision coincided with the birth of her son, Kai, who turns 5 in July. ''I had enough that was keeping me happy.''
An only child who grew up in Brooklyn Heights, Ms. Connelly didn't aspire to act.
''I didn't have any movie posters on my walls. I wasn't at all that kind of kid. I thought that I'd be a vet or something.''
She spent two years at Yale and one at Stanford but left college to pursue acting.
Ms. Connelly, who starts work this month on Ang Lee's ''The Hulk,'' likes to bring her son to the set.
''For me, vacation is to be completely present with him,'' she says. ''That's rest, and recovery. And I love that time.''
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