Jennifer Connelly

• 1. Introduction

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  Jennifer Connelly was eleven years old when she walked into an audition for the director Sergio Leone and tried to pass as a ballerina. She had never taken a ballet lesson. She simply imitated what she imagined a dancer would do. Leone was casting the young Deborah Gelly, an aspiring dancer and actress, for his gangster epic Once Upon a Time in America. Her imitation impressed him, and so did a coincidence of faces. Her nose resembled that of Elizabeth McGovern, the actress who played Deborah as an adult. Together those two things won her the part. Years later, Connelly called the experience "an incredibly idyllic introduction to movie-making." She is an American actress who would eventually win an Academy Award. How does a child cast on a lucky resemblance become a performer that filmmakers seek out? What did starting so early cost her? And why did the same early start that opened doors also make some filmmakers hesitate?

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• 2. Brooklyn to Stanford

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  Round Top, a hamlet in the town of Cairo, New York, is where Jennifer Lynn Connelly was born on the 12th of December 1970. She was the only child of Ilene Carol, an antique dealer, and Gerard Connelly, a clothing manufacturer. Her mother was Jewish, had been educated at a yeshiva, and descended from emigrants from Poland and Russia. Her father was a Catholic of Irish and Norwegian descent.

  Brooklyn Heights, in New York City, became the family's home when Connelly was one year old, and she enrolled at Saint Ann's School. Gerard suffered from asthma, so in 1976 the family relocated to the town of Woodstock to escape the city's smog. They returned to Brooklyn Heights four years later, and Connelly went back to Saint Ann's.

  In 1988 she finished high school and went to Yale University to study English literature. She remembers herself as a conscientious and rather nerdy student who spent most of her out-of-class hours in the law school library, since it never closed. In her words, she "wasn't really concerned with having a social life or sleeping or eating much." After two years at Yale she transferred to Stanford University to study drama. There she trained with Roy London, Howard Fine, and Harold Guskin. Her parents encouraged her to keep pursuing film, so she left college and went back to the industry.

  Her parents divorced in 2000. Her father died in 2008 and her mother in 2013.

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• 3. The Public Face

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  An advertising executive who was a friend of her father's first suggested, when Connelly was ten years old, that she try modeling. Her parents sent a photograph to the Ford Modeling Agency, which soon added her to its roster. She worked in print advertisements first and then moved into television commercials. In a 2002 interview with The Guardian, she said that after some modeling she still had no ambition to become an actress.

  Seventeen magazine, an American publication for teenagers, put her on several covers in 1986 and 1988. In December 1986 she also recorded two pop songs for the Japanese market, titled "Monologue of Love" and "Message of Love." She does not speak Japanese, so she sang the lyrics phonetically. She also appeared in a series of advertisements for the Shiseido company in the 1980s.

  In 2008, the Parisian fashion house Balenciaga and the cosmetics brand Revlon both signed her as the face of their campaigns. Shiseido came back in February 2012 and announced her as its first global brand ambassador. Since 2015 she has been House Ambassador for the French luxury fashion house Louis Vuitton. Time, Vanity Fair, Esquire, and the Los Angeles Times have all placed her on lists of the most beautiful women in the world.

  On the 14th of November 2005, Amnesty International named her its Ambassador for Human Rights Education. She also appeared in an advertisement about the world's need for clean water. In it she asked for donations to drilling projects in Africa, India, and Central America run by the non-profit organization Charity: Water. On the 2nd of May 2009 she took part in Revlon's annual 5k Run/Walk for Women. In May 2012 she became an ambassador for the Save the Children fund, speaking up for children's rights in the United States and around the world.

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• 4. Cult Fantasies

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  Dario Argento, the Italian director known for giallo thrillers, gave Connelly her first leading role in the 1985 film Phenomena. She played a girl who enrolls at a Swiss school and uses a psychic link with insects to hunt the killer of its students. During filming a chimpanzee attacked her and bit her finger. Seven Minutes in Heaven, a coming-of-age film in which she also had the lead, was released the same year.

  Looking back, she said, "Before I knew it, acting became what I did. It was a very peculiar way to grow up, combined with my personality." She described feeling like a walking puppet through her teenage years. Her career was drawing attention, and she had no time alone to process it.

  Jim Henson's 1986 fantasy Labyrinth, made with David Bowie, brought her public recognition. She played Sarah Williams, a teenager who goes into the world of goblins to rescue her infant brother Toby. The film disappointed at the box office but later became a cult classic. The New York Times praised the importance of her part and still panned her work, saying she looked right but lacked conviction.

  In 1988 she began work on Etoile, an Italian film in which she played a ballet student; it was released in 1989. She also played the college student Gabby in Michael Hoffman's Some Girls. The next film she made would bring a different, sharper kind of attention.

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• 5. Wrong Kind of Attention

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  Dennis Hopper directed her in the 1990 film The Hot Spot, where she played Gloria Harper, a woman who is being blackmailed. The film failed at the box office, yet Connelly drew praise. Stephen Schaefer of USA Today wrote that she had "neatly managed the transition from child actress to ingenue." Speaking to Schaefer about her first nude scene, she said it was hard for her and that she had thought about it carefully. She felt it was not in a sleazy context.

  Garry Marshall, the director of Pretty Woman, considered her that same year for the role of Vivian Ward. He ultimately judged that she was too young for the part.

  A life-size cardboard cutout promoted the 1991 romantic comedy Career Opportunities. It showed her co-star Frank Whaley watching Connelly ride a mechanical horse, with the caption "He's about to have the ride of his life." People magazine criticized the film for exploiting her body. Connelly told Rolling Stone that a Yale professor had pointed the campaign out to her, and that "that wasn't something I felt all that comfortable about."

  Disney's The Rocketeer, also released in 1991, had a much bigger budget but failed to ignite her career. She played Jenny Blake, the aspiring-actress girlfriend of the stunt pilot Cliff. Disney had softened the character, who in the original work was based on the pin-up Bettie Page. New York magazine called the film "pallid" but wrote that "Connelly is properly cast." On that set she began a romance with her co-star Billy Campbell. They became engaged and then split in 1996, after five years together.

  In 1992 she appeared with Jason Priestley in the Roy Orbison music video for "I Drove All Night," directed by Peter Care. Betty Kaplan's Of Love and Shadows, a 1994 Argentine-American drama with Antonio Banderas, followed. In 1995 John Singleton cast her as a lesbian college student in Higher Learning.

  Mulholland Falls, a 1996 neo-noir, gave her the role of Allison Pond, the murdered mistress of General Timms, played by John Malkovich. A group of detectives led by Nick Nolte's Maxwell Hoover investigates her death. Connelly said the film shocked people who knew her, because she had always been careful about nudity. She felt the scenes were essential to the character and took them on as a challenge. The film was a box office failure.

  After the breakup with Campbell, she had a relationship with the photographer David Dugan. Their son was born in 1997.

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• 6. Proving Herself

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  Inventing the Abbotts, a 1997 drama set in the late 1950s, cast her as Eleanor, one of three daughters of the town millionaire Lloyd Abbott. A critic at Entertainment Weekly thought she "raises the stakes any time she's on screen." Co-producer Ron Howard said she brought depth and complexity to difficult psychological moments in the film. He added, "I guess I stored that information in the back of my brain."

  Rufus Sewell, William Hurt, Ian Richardson, and Kiefer Sutherland shared the screen with her in the 1998 science fiction film Dark City. She played Emma, a torch singer whose husband, John Murdoch, has amnesia. As Murdoch starts to recover his memories, Mr. Hand and the Strangers kidnap Emma, alter her memories, and give her a new identity. The author Sean McMullen wrote, "Jennifer Connelly is visually splendid as the 1940s femme fatale (Emma)."

  Far Harbor, a 1996 independent film, had already given her the role of Elie, a prominent figure at a Hollywood studio who writes a screenplay drawn from her own traumas. That performance mattered later. Director Keith Gordon was reluctant to cast her in Waking the Dead because he did not consider her a serious actress. Her agent, Risa Shapiro, persuaded him to watch her work in Far Harbor.

  Gordon later said, "There was a subtlety and depth even to her gaze that captured more of the relationship than I ever could have hoped for." In the 2000 film, based on a novel from 1986, she played Sarah Williams, an activist killed by a car bomb in Minneapolis while driving Chilean refugees. It was the same name as her Labyrinth heroine. Connelly said it was the first film in which everything she did felt like her own.

  Ed Harris directed her that year in Pollock, where she played Ruth Kligman, the mistress of the painter Jackson Pollock. The film received mostly positive reviews. She also played Catherine Miller in The Street, a Fox drama series about a brokerage house in New York.

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• 7. Preparing for the Part

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  Marion Silver, the character Connelly played in Darren Aronofsky's Requiem for a Dream, lived in a particular building, and Connelly rented an apartment there. The film is based on the novel by Hubert Selby Jr. and also stars Jared Leto, Marlon Wayans, and Ellen Burstyn. Marion, a middle-class girl from Manhattan Beach, dreams of opening a dress shop but becomes addicted to heroin and slides into prostitution. Connelly was drawn to the script's treatment of addiction and its effect on relatives. In the apartment she isolated herself, painted, listened to music she imagined Marion would play, and designed clothes. She also talked to addicts and went to Narcotics Anonymous meetings with a friend in recovery.

  Elvis Mitchell of The New York Times wrote that her fall "is the most precipitous" and that her performance gives the movie weight. He added that she had never before done anything "to prepare us for how good she is here."

  The script of Ron Howard's 2001 film A Beautiful Mind, loosely based on Sylvia Nasar's 1998 biography of the mathematician John Nash, caught her interest. Shapiro sent the producers a tape with a clip of the then-unreleased Requiem for a Dream, and Connelly was invited to audition. Producer Brian Grazer cast her as Alicia Nash, the enduring wife of John Nash, who has schizophrenia and is played by Russell Crowe. Howard and the producers picked her and Crowe for their chemistry on screen. Before filming started, Connelly met the real Alicia Nash to learn about her life.

  The film grossed more than US$313 million worldwide. For her performance, Connelly earned a Golden Globe, an Academy Award, and a BAFTA Award for Best Supporting Actress. Richard Schickel of Time called her performance "luminous." Roger Ebert said the showier part belonged to Crowe, but that Connelly's complex work, as a woman torn by love for and fear of the same man, elevated the film.

  She called the film one she was really proud of. She also explained that for a time she felt passed over for adult projects, because people did not want to cast "the girl who was in that movie." With the award behind her, she said she was happy to take her time and choose projects she felt strongly about.

  House of Sand and Fog, a 2003 drama based on the novel by Andre Dubus III, followed. She played Kathy Nicolo, an abandoned wife whose inherited house is sold at auction to the Iranian emigre and former colonel Massoud Amir Behrani, played by Ben Kingsley. Connelly liked that the story has no good guy and no bad guy, since both sides do morally questionable things. Producer Michael London said he did not think any other actress could have played Kathy with such power and grace. A BBC critic wrote that she convinced totally.

  Virginia premiered on the 15th of September 2010 at the Toronto International Film Festival. It reached limited release two years later, in May 2012. As the title character, a mentally unstable woman, she studied documentaries on schizophrenia and spent time at the New York State Psychiatric Institute and the New York University Cancer Center. Director Dustin Lance Black asked her advice on designing the set of Virginia's house and choosing the character's clothes.

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• 8. Later Work and Family

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  Ang Lee's Hulk, released in 2003, drew her because she was interested in his philosophical view of the Marvel Comics superhero. She played Betty Ross, a scientist and the former girlfriend of Bruce Banner. Reviews were mixed and the film was a moderate success.

  On the 1st of January 2003, in a private family ceremony in Scotland, she married the actor Paul Bettany, whom she met while working on A Beautiful Mind. They have a son born in 2003 and a daughter born in 2011. After living in Tribeca, they moved to Brooklyn Heights.

  A two-year absence from film ended with the 2005 horror film Dark Water, based on a 2002 Japanese film. She played Dahlia, a young woman haunted by her past who moves with her daughter into a troubled New York apartment. Roger Ebert wrote that he cared about her character, who "is not a horror heroine but an actress playing a mother faced with horror."

  In 2006 she appeared in Little Children with Kate Winslet and in Blood Diamond with Leonardo DiCaprio, playing the journalist Maddy Bowen. Both films were nominated for multiple Academy Awards. Reservation Road came out in 2007, with Connelly as Grace, a mother grieving after a hit-and-run kills her son. By her own account, it was the hardest character she had played.

  The 2008 remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still made her the astrobiologist Helen Benson, opposite Keanu Reeves. In the original she was a secretary, but in this version she has a troubled relationship with her stepson, played by Jaden Smith. In 2009 she appeared in He's Just Not That Into You. She also played Emma Darwin, wife of Charles Darwin, in Creation opposite her real-life husband Paul Bettany. The film is set during the writing of On the Origin of Species and includes the couple's mourning for their daughter Anne. She also voiced the warrior "7" in the animated film 9.

  The Dilemma, Ron Howard's 2011 comedy with Vince Vaughn, opened to generally negative reviews. Salvation Boulevard premiered at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival, and in March 2012 Audible.com released her audiobook of The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles. Stuck in Love, Winter's Tale, and Aloft followed. In 2015 she starred in Shelter, the directorial debut of her husband. Her 2014 role as Naameh in Aronofsky's Noah reunited her with Russell Crowe.

  Snowpiercer, a science fiction series, ran from 2020 to 2024 and starred her as Melanie Cavill. Top Gun: Maverick, directed by Joseph Kosinski, was released in 2022 after delays caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. She played Penelope "Penny" Benjamin. In 2024 she began starring in the series Dark Matter. Her record at the Saturn Awards stretches from The Rocketeer in 1992 to Dark Matter in 2025.

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