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Connelly shines in the dark
By Terry Lawson & Bob Tourtellotte (Knight
Ridder Tribune and Reuters)
The West Australian
March 11, 2004
"I think I need a comedy," exclaims
Oscar-winning actress Jennifer Connelly. The
star of the acclaimed drama, House of Sand
and Fog, has vaulted on to Hollywood's A-list
of leading ladies in recent years for a series
of films exploring dark themes.
Connelly has played the collegue of a doomed
scientist (Hulk), the wife of a schizophrenic
mathematics genius (A Beautiful Mind), the
mistress of a tortured painter (Pollock), the
drug addicted girlfriend of a junkie (Requiem
for a Dream) and the doomed lover of a politician
(Waking the Dead).
Things don't get much brighter in Sand and
Fog with her role as Kathy Nicolo, a recovering
alcoholic whose home is repossessed by the
authorities in return for back taxes.
Connelly says she has had enough of tragic
heroines but comedic roles just do not come
her way. "It's not like, you know, the
hot new comedy comes around and they think
of Jennifer Connelly," she jokes.
The 33-year-old actress says that one of the
reasons she has done so many dark roles is
that she enjoys the challenge that comes with
such territory.
"I wouldn't say I enjoy being slapped
around but I like to be challenged. If I'm
not, I get bored and if I get bored, I'm not
so good. So I tend to choose to play people
like Kathy, whose life is cursed with conflict," Connelly
says.
Connelly made her impressive movie debut at
age 14, playing the object of infatuation for
a little hoodlum who would grow up to be Robert
De Niro in Sergio Leone's stylised fairytale
of a gangster epic, Once Upon a Time in America.
Her first lead role came as a young girl lost
in a fairytale (of her own making?) in Jim
Henson's dark children's fantasy, Labyrinth,
case opposite David Bowie.
"I was never that interested in a conventional
kind of movie career," says Connelly, "perhaps
because I started making fairly serious movies
right away as opposed to commercial or teen
movies. In fact, when I got older and those
sorts of roles were all I was offered, I just
dropped out for a while."
Connelly went to university, attending Yale
and Stanford, before deciding to return to
acting with Mulholland Falls. Since then she
has taken only roles that consume her.
"I can't say I particularly enjoy digging
into those dark, emotional places, but being
able to go there for a few hours a day for
a few weeks and come home and be a mum, that's
a pretty good deal."
Connelly has a six-year-old son, Kai, with
photographer David Dugan, but their relationship
had begun to fray by the time she made A Beautiful
Mind - for which she won best supporting actress
in 2002 - and met British actor Paul Bettany.
She says she and Bettany remained just friends
for more than a year, until "we realised
the friendship was developing into something
more".
They married in January 2003 and their son,
Stellan, was born in August.
"I think having a stable family life
really affords you a kind of emotional freedom
for your acting," says Connelly. "Paul
and I were just crazy in love when I was making
House of Sand and Fog, and he was making Master
and Commander, and that made it easier to let
go of the pain.
"But even on the set, no one was immersed
in misery when we weren't playing our scenes."
Connelly says with her son eight months old,
she's looking forward to going back to work
- to, yes, another walk on the dark side, a
thriller called Dark Water, directed by Walter
Salles (Central Station), in which she plays
a single mother who is haunted.
But when she's finished, Connelly says, she
figures she'll finally be ready to lighten
up.
"I've resisted romantic comedy almost
subconsciously up to this point," she
says, "and I've been thinking it could
be because I was scared of it. So I figure
that's the best reason to give it a try."
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