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Jennifer Connelly - taking the other direction
By Jeff Otto
The Times
February 28, 2004
When superstardom beckoned, Jennifer Connelly turned and ran in the opposite direction. Lesley O'Toole finds out why
In 2002, at the age of 31, Jennifer Connelly capped a 20-year acting career by winning both a Bafta and an Oscar for her role as the wife of the mathematical genius John Nash (Russell Crowe) in A Beautiful Mind. With her next starring role in a mega-budget studio film &emdash; Ang Lee's much-hyped Hulk &emdash; Connelly looked finally to have arrived on the Hollywood A-list.
But she has not gone on to achieve Julia Roberts-style superstardom, nor has she cultivated a media-friendly profile. Instead, she has developed a reputation as an intense, cerebral woman who might take herself too seriously and gets prickly when the subject of her personal life is broached.
And yet the Connelly I meet seems as preternaturally sunny as the crisp, clear LA winter day, and not remotely prickly. She is gorgeous, certainly, with gleaming long dark hair and huge brown eyes that fix my gaze. A model of elegance in a skin-tight black sweater, pencil skirt and stilettos, she could have stepped off the pages of 1940s Vogue, even though she had given birth to her second son three months earlier. She is friendly, confident and professional &emdash; no giggly hair-twirling here &emdash; and utterly unable to contain a certain unbridled joy in both her work and personal life.
Connelly, I suspect, barely batted a lustrous-lashed eyelid when Hulk failed to emulate either the critical or commercial success of A Beautiful Mind. Instead, she returned to the sort of complex, sombre, independent-spirited scripts with which she first made waves (Waking the Dead, Requiem for a Dream) before Oscar came to call. Her latest film, House of Sand and Fog, fits the bill perfectly. A smart, critically acclaimed novel that achieved mass-market saturation in America thanks to its selection by Oprah Winfrey's Book Club, Andrew Dubus III's work is a cautionary tale of the American Dream gone badly awry. Kathy Nicolo, a former alcoholic and drug addict, has lost her husband, her self-esteem and any will to live.
Having also misplaced her propensity for opening the post, she fails to notice that her house is about to be repossessed and loses it at auction to Massoud Amri Behrani (Ben Kingsley). A former colonel in the Shah of Iran's Air Force, Behrani is now forced to work for a demeaning minimum wage while deceiving his wife and teenage son into thinking he's an upwardly mobile white collar-type. What ensues is a heartbreaking battle for the house, which culminates in tragedy of Shakespearean dimensions.
"I liked the fact that the movie brought into question who is entitled to partake in the American Dream and the fact that it's a story about intolerance," says Connelly, "and I love that my character Kathy, like the other principal characters in the film, is so flawed. It makes her more human, more accessible, more realistic and more interesting to play."
Nicolo is also the sort of intense, unglamorous character over whom the Academy Award-voting brigade salivate, and indeed almost all the Oscar-race pundits had Connelly as a shoo-in for a Best Actress nomination. Yet it was her two co-stars, Kingsley and Shorheh Aghdashloo, who got the nod, while Connelly was overlooked. Not that she seems too worried. In fact, ask her about delving into dark crevices to play characters such as Kathy and she is almost embarrassed at her failure to articulate any kind of method.
"I don't know what I do," she says, shrugging her shoulders. Her directors often don't know either. Darren Aronofsky, who directed her in the uncompromising drug addiction drama Requiem for a Dream, says of one lurid scene in the film: "We don't really talk about what happened that night."
"That said," continues Connelly, "I do a lot of preparation before coming to a job, and in this case having the novel was like having Kathy's diary. It was written so beautifully and in the first person so it made me think a lot about who she was and what she wanted, what her pain was and what her dreams were." In the novel Kathy is what Americans love to deem "white trash", but Connelly "didn't see her as that kind of person. I saw her as fighting against the way she's perceived".
In the book, Nicolo wanders naked around her home, something Connelly balked at, though not for the reason one might expect (actresses known for a relaxed attitude to nudity often turn prudish once in possession of an Oscar).
"It was nothing like that," she smiles, taking no offence where less secure stars might. "It just made no sense to me that she'd walk around naked. She's depressed. It's not just that she can't cope inside the world, but she can't cope inside her own skin either. I think those people walk around the house in a sweatshirt and sweatpants. I don't think they have a bad day and go: 'Ooh, I'm going to take my clothes off.'"
Having renounced her shot at being the Next Big Hollywood Thing, did Connelly ever find herself in a similar state of mind? "It's strange, but I don't think I thought about that much back then. I just kept plugging away. I'd get frustrated when I couldn't get an audition, but I never got despondent."
Connelly had been plugging away since the age of ten, despite there not being a whiff of a theatrical background in her family. Her Irish father worked in the garment industry, a job his daughter never thought suited him, given a bohemian streak that pushed him twice to move his family to Woodstock. Twice they moved back to Brooklyn, New York, and once they had settled, Connelly began attending auditions at the suggestion of a family friend.
At 11, she was cast in her first feature film, Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in America, in which she played Elizabeth McGovern's character as a child. Other jobs were less glamorous. "I'd be the geeky little girl in leotards on the Danskin (dance wear) package," she says ruefully. She made a few more films while at high school (Labyrinth, Some Girls) before entering Yale to read theatre and English literature.
She nearly didn't return to acting at all. "Let's just say I was someone who liked a certain kind of movie and had on my résumé some that didn't quite fit the bill. So I just felt a big discrepancy. Also, I'd started acting so young that I went through years where I felt I'd grown up being selfconscious and scrutinised for my appearance and everything I did. It was so difficult for me to grow up and deal with all that. And I was becoming a bit neurotic at times."
These days, there is no sign of such neurosis, the result, perhaps, of a bit of assistance from her husband of just over a year, the English actor Paul Bettany. "He would sit in my trailer on House of Sand and Fog strumming his guitar and singing, 'Ooooh, my name's Jennifer and I'm a very serious actress and take myself seriously', and that sort of thing."
The couple met on A Beautiful Mind, but did not become romantically involved until some time later. Their first child Stellan, born last August, is named for the esteemed Swedish actor Stellan Skarsgård, with whom Bettany worked on Lars von Trier's Dogville. Connelly also has a son, Kai, six, from a previous relationship with the photographer David Dugan.
"I wanted to be a mother from when I was really young," says Connelly. "I don't think I was ever certain about what I thought about marriage. But at this point I'm thrilled about the whole marriage thing and I am more into the housewife thing than I ever thought I would be. When I was pregnant with Stellan it was ridiculous. I walked round London in my sandals and little dresses, then went to the fish market before going home and cooking dinner. Paul was like, 'God, you've become a 1940s housewife.' It was fun. But then it was also fun saying: 'OK, now I'm going back to work and I'll bring the baby with me thank you very much.'
"In the time we've been together we've made four movies and managed to spend most of our time together. Thanks to me! He hates schedules. He never knows what he's doing, which means I'm the one who organises all the paperwork."
If Connelly's schedule has a heading for "Ideal Next Job" the chances are it would be a comedy, a sign perhaps that, having ditched her dark days off-camera, she's prepared to do the same in front of it.
"I'm so ready for that. But I'm not on the top of the list of people they're considering when there's a hot comedy script. So it will take a bit of finagling to get myself cast in a good one. And I don't want to do anything mediocre."
She cites Igby Goes Down and the films of the Coen brothers and Paul Thomas Anderson as preferred models. Her next project, though, sees her back on familiar territory Dark Water, directed by Walter Salles (Central Station), is "a scary movie but not one of those Scary Movies. I'm going through a custody battle over a five-year-old daughter.
"Yeah, I know." She grins. "Another happy mother."
House of Sand and Fog is on general release.
Connelly seven up
Her top roles to see on DVD
ONCE UPON A TIME IN AMERICA (1984)
Big-screen debuts don't come much bigger than this.
LABYRINTH (1986)
Overshadowed by Bowie's hairdo in Jim Henson's ambitious fairytale.
REQUIEM FOR A DREAM (2000)
Drugs movie with graphic scenes.
WAKING THE DEAD (2000)
Connelly haunts a congressman as the reincarnaton of his lost love.
A BEAUTIFUL MIND (2001)
An Oscar-winning role as the wife of Russell Crowe's troubled genius.
HULK (2003)
Connelly looks uncomfortable as Bruce Banner's squeeze in Ang Lee's Marvel adaptation.
HOUSE OF SAND AND FOG (2003)
Back on form in this highbrow screen version of the bestselling novel.
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