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Finding inner beauty
by Michael Bodey
Daily Telegraph
March 7, 2002
AN Oscar nomination has catapulted A Beautiful Mind star Jennifer Connelly out of B-grade babe land, as MICHAEL BODEY reports.
Jennifer Connelly has every right to feel confident after her performance opposite Russell Crowe in Oscar favourite A Beautiful Mind. It tops a stellar four years in which the striking New Yorker has replaced her reputation as a B-movie object of desire with an assured actress's cred.
As a Golden Globe winner and Oscar favourite in the category of best supporting actress for her portrayal of the wife of Nobel Prize winning schizophrenic John Forbes Nash, Connelly's blown many away. So she should be confident, yes? It comes across more as understated.
When speaking to The Daily Telegraph, she wasn't even aware she'd won a Golden Satellite award the previous night.
"Oh my goodness, thank you, that's very nice," she laughs, embarrassed, although relieved she doesn't have to deliver another speech in front of a room full of her peers.
"It all seems to be happening now but the Golden Globes were fun," she says.
"All these people that I've respected and admired for so long in this one room and to feel like I was part of this community, it was almost embarrassing to get up in front of those people there, people who have taught me over years."
And it has been some years. The 31-year-old New Yorker began as a child model who found herself cast in Sergio Leone's epic Once Upon A Time In America and the hit, Labyrinth. Then followed a cheesy star role in The Rocketeer before she became a bounteous dream girl in even lesser fare like The Hot Spot, Career Opportunities and Mulholland Falls.
Darren Aronofsky's intense drug-addiction film Requiem For A Dream turned it all around, though. Connelly delivered a mature performance that ensured she was an actor, not an object. And now as Alicia Nash she should win her first Oscar before taking up with Eric Bana in Ang Lee's The Incredible Hulk.
From Sergio Leone to Ang Lee, by way of Disney, certainly looks like full circle?
"Kind of. I feel like I've come into my own or I'm on my way to doing it," she agrees.
"I didn't really know what I was doing when I was 11, I fell into the hands of a really incredible filmmaker then but, yeah, there were a number of years where I took it for granted that's what I did without really being mindful of what I was doing.
"There was a period of time where I had to reassess what I was doing -- [ask] is this really what I want to do? -- look at these movies that I'm making and I [didn't] really feel they're reflective of who I am and what I want to do.
"There was a time period where it was a bit of a struggle because I knew what I wanted to do but I was being connected back to movies that I'd done much earlier."
Connelly admits she feels "much more comfortable" with her past four years primarily because she is a new mother and new mothers need good reasons to be away from their three-year-old son.
"I don't want to work on anything that I'm not passionate about."
A Beautiful Mind was a no brainer then. Working opposite Crowe in a film by Ron Howard about a tortured genius and his indomitable wife was always going to be challenge. And Oscar bait if it worked.
"Russell's challenging in that he's really passionate about what he does," Connelly says. "He's so smart and talented, he can really want someone to step up to the plate and meet the occasion. I find it kind of exhilarating working with him and really fun. Our working styles were very compatible," she says.
Their thorough rehearsal period meant the actors were always "open to each other".
"We were always sort of in the same scene at the same time and that, I think, contributes to that sense that these two people are really together.
"I am happy with it and that's saying a lot for me because I am a really harsh critic," she laughs.
Not that a meeting with the real Alicia Nash helped their preparation, as Connelly tells it.
"I wanted to say: 'With licence, I am playing you more or less and is there anything that you would like me to convey about you or don't want me to?'
"But in reality it turned into a friendly lunch and all she wanted to know was what Russell was like," she laughs.
"I was kind of hoping for some gem of an insight. That didn't really come but I felt better at least having met her and given her that opportunity."
The next opportunity is a huge but fraught one: taking on Betty Ross in the comic book adaptation of The Incredible Hulk with Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon director Lee.
"The way that he talks about it, I can hardly even follow him. He's so smart, he's so creative, I'm kind of in awe," Connelly says.
"Every time I come away from him I'm a little bit perplexed and really excited because he's got these really innovative, brave ideas. It really will be not like any other comic book movie, or any other movie I've seen, from the way he's talking about it and what he wants to do."
There will be major special effects, of course "but it'll also be a very strange five character family drama, a character study".
As if the journey could be any more strange.
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