Connelly and Company

 

 

By Lisa Green

Black + White (Australia), Issue 71

March 2004 

 

With a new husband, a new baby, and an Oscar, Jennifer Connelly has a lot to be happy about. Her performance in the searing drama House of Sand and Fog is another reason to celebrate, writes Lisa Green. 

 

Often in Hollywood junket-journalism you're obliged to compete with other writers for the attention of your interviewee. Less frequently, you have to compete with a hungry infant.

Jennifer Connelly has had to interrupt her round of interviews today, periodically, to feed her three-month-old son, Stellan. "It's been so much harder having two," she says in a Los Angeles hotel suite, "because you feel a bit torn. With the first one I wasn't working as much and now I'm doing press junkets and then going on my husband's junkets and wanting to be there for [six-year-old] Kai, and then there's the little one. It feels like a balancing act."

These days Connelly is frequently described as the girl who has everything. Stellan's father is handsome British born actor Paul Bettany (Master and Commander), whom she married in Scotland on New Year's Day last year. She won an Oscar two years ago, and her lead role in House of Sand and Fog is attracting more praise for the 33-year-old actor.

Like 2001's In the Bedroom, House of Sand and Fog is adapted from a tale of domestic tragedy written by Andre Dubois III. Connelly plays Kathy Nicolo, a recovering addict who loses the home her father left her thank to the combination of bureaucratic fuckup and the fact that in her self-destructive state she has neglected to open her mail. At the ensuing auction Massoud Amir Behrani (Ben Kingsley), an impoverished Iranian immigrant, snaps up Kathy's home at a bargain price. A former colonel under the Shah of Iran, Behrani has banked his family's future on the idyllic house, and he is the immoveable object in the face of Kathy's unstoppable efforts to get it back.

During shooting, Connelly would get into Kathy's despondent mood by listening to Radiohead, only to be distracted by her son's games and a playful Bettany, "who would make fun of me for taking myself too seriously". She confesses the film represents practically the opposite of her current state of mind. "It's one of those movies that shakes you up. You can see the tragedy coming. I walked out of it and thought, 'I just want to go to my kids, be with my family, I can't believe I get so worked up about things.'"

Ben Kingsley has built a career on characters with wills of iron, but Connelly found her co-star to be unassuming on set. "He knows what he's doing in a way that makes him lovely to be around. There's no fanfare, he sort of comes in, does his job, and then you see it on the screen and go, 'Whoa... that's what you were up to.' It's extraordinary."

Her real stress in making the film - directed by newcomer Vadim Perelman - came during the last two weeks of the shoot, when she realised she was pregnant. "I didn't want to tell anyone, but [the character] smokes and so the prop guys would give me cigarettes and I'd say, 'I don't think Kathy would smoke in this scene,' and they all started to get a bit like, 'What's up with you?' I ended up telling Vadim."

It's possible to pinpoint the exact moment in A Beautiful Mind when the Oscar plonks right into Connelly's lap. "You want to know what's real?" she asks Russell Crowe's deranged mathematician, caressing his cheek. "This is real." The film's conceit is that Connelly eases Crowe's schizophrenia with love and frequent medication, and dramatically the scene is hokum; but as the birth of a star its logic is impeccable. Connelly's arresting eyebrows, misty green eyes and pouty upper lip combine to embody 'concern' in one unforgettable equation. (It's a role she more or less reprised in last year's Hulk, offering anger-management counselling to Eric Bana's Bruce Banner.)

Of course, she's a far more versatile actor than her recent parts would suggest, and the Academy Award was also a recognition of Connelly's 20-year career in the movies - a career that saw her reach the brink of stardom in her teens before clawing the bottom rungs again in her twenties. Born in the Catskill Mountains, NY and bred in Brooklyn Heights, she worked a child model before debuting in the epic Once Upon a Time in America, Sergio Leone's coarse and sentimental 1984 swansong; she was the slender 12-year-old ballerina who captured the heart of the Jewish kid who would grow up to be Robert de Niro.

As a freckle-faced adolescent she starred in Jim Henson's Labyrinth - her cheerful awkwardness stole the show from a cast of irritating muppets and David Bowie in too-tight tights. Then, at the end of her teens, her body had filled out enough to land her exactly the kind of parts she shouldn't have taken as The Babe in going-nowhere fare such as The Hot Spot, Career Opportunities and The Rocketeer - the latter notable for putting the last nails in the careers of both Timothy Dalton and its leading man, Bill Campbell.

No wonder that in the early '90s Connelly fled from LA back to New York. "I felt ... observed," she told Harper's Bazaar recently.

But thanks to a better-chosen path of intelligent, off-beat fare, Connelly was able to remake herself in the public eye as a serious actor, not merely an extraordinarily attractive one. The year 2000 was her watershed: we saw Connelly as a 1970s political activist in Waking the Dead, as Jackson Pollock's mistress in Pollock, and as a junkie who slides agonisingly into prostitution in Requiem for a Dream. Requiem in particular got critics to sit up and pay attention: from the ecstasy of a heroin haze, to lashing out at her boyfriend when he fails to score, to limply mouthing 'I'm not really hooked' after trading sex for a fix, Connelly's performance was devastating and nuanced.

Her Oscar win for A Beautiful Mind in March 2002 revealed something else about Connelly: her profound shyness. She took to the stage like a reluctant schoolkid and barely lifted her head from the speech notes. "A deer in the headlights experience," she laughs. "It was so overwhelming and when I get stressed I tend to get very quiet, and people misinterpreted [that] as apathy, which it wasn't." If nominated again for House of Sand and Fog, things will be different, she assures me. "I might be a bit more relaxed."

In spite of having been a child performer, Connelly has never really overcome her bashful side. When asked if she would allow her children to become actors, she answers, "not as kids. It's a lot of pressure, an incredible amount of scrutiny that kids have to go through at a time when you're feeling self-conscious. I wanted to make everyone happy so it kept me from feeling like I could explore who I was. You have to function like an adult when you should just be messing around, cutting your hair and being an idiot."

A Beautiful Mind introduced her to Paul Bettany, cast as Crowe's Princeton roommate, and while sparks flew nothing happened until after Connelly's Oscar triumph. "We got along really well when we were working together but we were both in other relationships. We had that sort of, 'I really like this guy but I'm in this,' which made Paul really curious because it basically translated into a year of not calling him back and that sort of thing. But it all worked out in the end."

Connelly praises Bettany's fathering and stepfathering abilities. "He's very hands-on, he sings stupid songs and makes stupid faces. It's great going through it with him." Making another film together is not such a priority. "I think people want that fantasy - 'are they going to hook up?' So we're going to try and choose wisely. We'll wait for something really great."

Home for Connelly and family is a townhouse in New York. "We finally moved out of my really dodgy small apartment in the West Village that made us all cranky," she says, her Anglicised adjectives perhaps revealing some of Bettany's influence. "It was horrendous, like if you put mice in a really small space and see how they try and kill one another. And the sad thing is we have the same amount of furniture. We have no couches." Not quite the girl who has everything, then.