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The Actor's Actor
By Phoebe Hoban
Marie Claire
January 2007
With Blood Diamond, the latest in a long line of harrowing movies, Jennifer Connelly proves she isn’t afraid of the dark
“Are you listening to this? The world’s falling apart, and all we hear about is Blowjobgate.” That’s Jennifer Connelly, not the beautiful and seemingly demure woman sipping tea with skim milk across from me, but as Maddy Bowen, a journalist in this month’s Blood Diamond, about the illegal gem trade. She delivers that zinger with admirable verve the very first time she encounters Leonardo DiCaprio as a smooth-talking smuggler in war-ravaged Sierra Leone.
Connelly didn’t think twice about taking the part. “Maddy is a great character,” she says. “She’s about as fiery and feisty as they come. She has a passion for life, drinks her minibar, flirts a lot. But she’s striving to do something good—she’s sort of frustrated by herself and her limitations. She wants to be a toughie, but she’s not.”
At first glance Connelly, elegant but dressed down in tight jeans and a sweater, seems to have a little in common with tousled, tell-it-like-it-is, in-your-face Maddy. Here she is, once again gracing the screen with messy hair, no makeup, and zero wardrobe, and still looking like a total babe.
Despite her almost prim style off-screen, Connelly clearly likes getting down and dirty in her film roles. Think of the dissipated junkie who performs raunchy sex acts for a fix in Requiem for a Dream, the hopeless loser in House of Sand and Fog, or the despairing divorcee in Dark Water—in which, frequently drenched, she competes for screen time with torrents of murky water. (At least the recent Little Children, in which she plays a workaholic filmmaker with a straying, stay-at-home husband, takes some advantage of her ravishing looks). OK, so Connelly’s not going the Monster route á la Charlize Theron, but what is this penchant for grit when she could be glamming it up?
Blood Diamond director Ed Zwick says he never considered anyone else for the part. “Jennifer has a fierce intelligence, and she also has great lightness and buoyancy, not all of which I’d seen in some of her other parts,” he says. “The camera can always tell whether someone knows what they are saying in its deepest meanings, and she inhabits the lines. In addition to which, I wanted someone who could give Leo a run for his money, who was confident and would not be overawed and would help him raise the level of his game. There are any number of actors who are perfectly talented who wouldn’t have had that effect on him. He sensed that from the beginning, and I saw him sit up straighter in his chair.”
Beneath her polite veneer, Connelly displays a disarming lack of pretence. Hollywood primps and perks are not her thing. She may be a movie star, but she once trekked through Tibet for three weeks without a shower and would rather be jogging around a neighborhood park (a daily ritual) than sitting in Manhattan’s posh Soho House talking about herself. She spent her days off from Blood Diamond, which was shot mostly in Mozambique, at a local orphanage. But unlike some celebrities, whose appearances at African orphanages make tabloid headlines, this one didn’t seek a single word of press. In fact, she doesn’t bring up the subject at all; it’s Zwick who mentions it.
Connelly’s slightly stern face—with those jet-black eyebrows—visibly melts when I ask her about the children she spent time with. “I went with Judy, a makeup artist I’ve done a few films with, one evening when they were getting ready to put the kids to bed,” she says. “There were maybe 40 or 50 kids in one room, and there were just, like, little gym mats on the floor with nothing over them, and a whole row of babies ranging from newborns to 3-year-olds. One of them was premature, and they were just lying there crying. It was horrendous. So we started doing as much as we could, but it was difficult.”
She pauses. “We had a party for them, and we brought them school supplies and stuff, and we started to feel close to some of these kids after that period of time, and I thought, Is it actually sort of selfish of me? Is it self-serving to go and feel like I’m doing something good for a month, two months, and then be just another person who disappoints them and leaves?”
Connelly is surprisingly underwhelming in person. If anything, she seems intensely down-to-earth—“the girl next door,” as Walter Salles, who directed her in Dark Water, puts it. Today she is wearing little or no makeup or jewellery, and that shiny mane is pulled back into a bun. Certainly she is strikingly pretty—Shoreh Aghdashloo, her co-star in House of Sand and Fog, describes her as looking like a Persian miniature—but there is nothing about her initially to elicit a “wow.”
And that’s exactly how Connelly wants it. She doesn’t aspire to fame or its trappings—a Beverly Hills mansion just isn’t her style. Instead, she lives in a Brooklyn brownstone with her husband, Paul Bettany, a well-known but unostentatious actor, and sons Stellan, 3, and Kai, 9 (the latter with photographer David Dugan). Connelly seems to have little interest in even the most glamorous celebrity rites of passage. Indeed, when the camera panned to her after she’d picked up an Oscar for her work in A Beautiful Mind, she looked as bored and restless as a 6-year-old at a black-tie dinner.
“I was in such a fog,” she admits. “It was just such a big whirlwind of travelling and press. I’ve worked for a long time, and before that movie, this wasn’t the kind of thing that I did. I didn’t get invited to awards shows. So it was really a whole different world for me. I was just stunned by the whole experience.”
Says Ron Howard, who directed her in A Beautiful Mind, “With Jennifer, there’s a sense of a person who’s not a joiner, who follows her own path. It’s not aloofness—that implies a kind of disdain, which I don’t think she has. It’s sort of a singular perspective of the world.”
An introvert in an extrovert’s profession, Connelly has spent 26 years in the camera’s doting eye while simultaneously trying to shun the limelight. She claims to be unaware of her reputation for being reserved, but she readily admits she’s a perfectionist. “I guess what comes across is that I take my work really seriously. It’s good that my jobs come in few-month intervals, because when I’m working, I can’t put it down—I’m thinking about it all the time, and I’m sort of a nitpicker in that way.” Or as her agent, Risa Shapiro, puts it, “Jennifer is in fierce competition with herself.”
But the suggestion that she can at times be a bit severe evokes an unusually hearty chortle for such a slender woman. “When I’m just home with family and friends, I think I am a lot less solemn and contained than I get pegged. My kids don’t take me that seriously. But I’m not saying that I’m not compulsive and I won’t be found tidying up the house at two in the morning, because I have been known to do such weird things.”
Connelly is an only child—the kind who made suicide pacts with her stuffed animals, studied Chinese in sixth grade, and later claimed Wallace Stevens as a favorite poet. Her father, Gerard, worked in the garment business. Her mother, Eileen, once dealt antiques but now works at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, CA, as a cranial-massage therapist.
The family lived in Brooklyn Heights after a brief time in Woodstock, NY, and at age 10, Connelly was spotted by a family friend who worked in advertising—soon she was modeling for sewing-pattern and Danskin packages. Her acting career started a few years later when she played Robert de Niro’s childhood love in Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America. Like so many professional stunners, Connelly remembers having been a “geeky” kid.
Connelly went to auditions on a regular—sometimes daily—basis right up through high school. Was she being forced by a pushy stage mother? She says both her parents were supportive but not ambitious for her. “At the time I don’t remember saying, ‘No I don’t want to do this,’ but I don’t remember saying ‘This is my chosen path,’ either.”
She studied literature at Yale and Stanford but didn’t graduate. “I did it entirely wrong,” she says now. “All I did was work. I didn’t really feel part of a community—my social life was pretty pathetic. I put all of myself into my schoolwork”—and basically burned herself out. Between 1985 and 1995 she made more than 10 films, from the Muppet-plus-David Bowie flick Labyrinth to The Rocketeer.
It was only when she was in her 20s that Connelly began to think about the price she may have paid for being in front of a camera since she was a kid. “I just thought, God, what a weird way to grow up, to be so self-conscious and to have to be so aware,” she says. “Just to be performing for other people from an early age is really strange, especially for someone like me who has a tendency to be careful and wants to make people happy. So for a while, I felt a bit old on the outside and underdeveloped on the inside.”
Connelly found fulfilment at 26, when her son Kai was born. “I had gone through different stages where I read lots of philosophy, and lots of religious texts, and practised yoga,” she says. “I was always looking for something really pure and sacred—that was sort of my thing. It was always, Why is everything so profane, why do people let each other down all the time, why is everybody so fucked up?”
“And suddenly there was this thing that was the most sacred thing in the world, and then everything from there started to make sense. I had wanted to be a mom for a long time.”
Connelly met Bettany on 2001’s A Beautiful Mind. Both were involved in other relationships at the time and didn’t get together until more than a year later. Recalls Howard, “I saw not a flicker of attraction between her and Paul until about two days before we stopped filming. It was like junior high school—Paul had his guitar over there, serenading. As a guy, I kind of thought, That’s too late, Paul.” Apparently not—the two got married in January 2003 in a small ceremony in Scotland. (Both wore black.)
“Paul is a wonderful counterpart for her,” says Keith Gordon, who directed Connelly in Waking the Dead. “He is more boisterous and balances her in a great way. They are kind of yin and yang: She brings out his adult, and he brings out her kid.”
“I think I’m the happiest that I’ve been,” Connelly says. “There is something about Paul that is very pure, but he’s also really mucky. He has done lots of things and gone lots of places, and he is in no way uptight or puritanical, but there’s something really angelic about him. I just love being married. I love what it does to a relationship, knowing that you’re with the person you are going to be with. Even if you get pissed off at the other person, you are forced to figure out what’s bothering you and what’s going on and what needs to change and shift. I’ve really liked that process.” The two are thinking about having another child.
But there’s not much chance that all this happiness will affect her choice of roles: Connelly is currently shooting Reservation Road with Joaquin Phoenix, directed by Terry George (Hotel Rwanda), in which she plays a mother whose son has been killed in a hit-and-run accident. “It’s upsetting,” she says. “I’ve been driving home late at night from the set in Connecticut just to kiss the boys while they’re sleeping.”
At this point, Bettany appears, and Connelly’s face lights up like a chandelier. “Hi, honey,” he says. “I’ll go get myself a drink.”
A bit later, when I leave, she joins him and I glimpse them holding hands, looking deep into each other’s eyes. It’s just like a scene from a movie. At least this time, she’s picked a story with a happy ending.
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