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Up Close with Jennifer Connelly
By Jennifer Senior
Bazaar
July, 2003
With a new husband and a second child on the way, the actress talks openly about the dramatic changes in her life since her 2002 Oscar win.
Photographed by Patrick Demarchelier
It is hardly a pledge of the same nerve and magnitude as "No new taxes," but when Jennifer Connelly says she can't imagine ever trying Botox, the faddish injectable potion that instantly freezes away any wrinkles, it seems like a promising sign that the country is heading in the right direction.
"I don't like needles," she says, reaching for a glass of piping-mint tea." Based on that alone, I don't think I'd do it." She's silent for a moment and rubs her belly, now plump with her second child. "I mean, it's botulism," she blurts. "Isn't it? It's weird." She takes a sip and leans forward into our table at Cafe Loup, a West Village restaurant.
"She'll kill me for saying this," Jennifer continues, "but one of my relatives had Botox. And all of a sudden, her eyebrows were reeeaally faaaar apart." She demonstrates, pulling her lovely black brows taut with her pinkies, as if she were stringing up a volleyball net. "She looked kind of scary, where before she always looked so warm and loving. And I thought, Not you. You're a symbol of a beautiful woman, a woman who has nothing to do with that kind of world. I begged her not to do it anymore and told her I missed the crease in her forehead."
Jennifer lets go of her eyebrows and the delicate fork tines reappear above her nose.
"I think it's a bit of a tyranny. And it's sad, she says. "Really sad."
To a 32-year-old woman of such surpassing love as Jennifer Connelly, perhaps it is still unfathomable to consider using any substance that would obliterate the footprints of age. But her aversion to Botox probably also betrays just how great the psychic and physical distance is between her world and Hollywood, a town that so famously forbids its actresses from gracefully capitulating to maturity. Jennifer moved from Los Angeles back to Manhattan in 1993; spend five minutes with her and it's clear her whole identity is insepatable from this city, where she grew up.
"I frazzled, she announces, even though her energy, a seductive mix of containment and warmth, suggests the contrary. She is wearing no earrings, minimal makeup, a black Calvin Klein V-neck and a pair of Seven jeans tucked into boots she inherited from her wardrobe in Waking the Dead. "I tried to take five children to the Matisse Picasso exhibit today [at MoMA]. It backfired. Kai [her son] and I had really different opinions of Picasso. He prefers Vermeer."
Vermeer? Isn't Kai only five? "Okay," she says, laughing. "Not that be knows. But I took him to the Getty Museum in California and he was really impressed. He'd look at a painting and say, 'That looks like light bouncing off someone's forehead.' But the more two- dimensional art-he wasn't that interested. We stayed for 10 minutes and left. I have to go back."
Miraculously, she may now have the time. One year after winning an Academy Award for best supporting actress in A Beautiful Mind, the greatest developments in Jennifer's life have turned out to be personal rather than professional. On New Year's Day she married British actor Paul Bettany, and the couple is expecting a baby in August. So this month, after completing her press fandango for her star turn in The Hulk, Jennifer plans to ... house-hunt. And have her child. And establish the rhythms of a brand-new life with her brand-new husband. She has virtually no film plans whatsoever.
Which is all rather unusual, considering how much professional momentum Jennifer has gathered and how common it is in Hollywood to defer child-rearing until biological midnight. "What other actors or actresses are doing has no bearing on my life," she shrugs. I didn't think I was going to have any more kids. But then suddenly, with Paul, I really wanted to. And we just thought. Why not sooner rather than later?"
Jennifer met her husband on the set of A Beautiful Mind. She, as most people know, gave a vivid performance as Alicia Nash, the wife of the schizophrenic mathematician John Forbes Nash Jr. (Russell Crowe); Paul played Nash's large- headed Princeton University room mate. Because both she and Paul were seeing other people at the time, it wasn't until about a year after filming ended that they went on their first date. "If you want to call it that," says Jennifer. She bites a fingernail, bursting the penumbra of elegance and self-possession that ordinarily surrounds her. "It was really nice, actually, in that it didn't feel like a courtship," she says, resuming her deliberative tone. "It felt much more comfortable than that. Because we had the benefit of having been friends and having worked together."
The pair ended up getting married in Scotland in front of fewer than 20 guests. Her rings are as muted as her clothing - a tiny eternity band paved with micro diamonds and a small gold band. She also wears a necklace Paul made for her out of a dime that he sawed in halt. (He wears its mate.) "Admittedly, we decided to marry not long after we'd been together," she says, artfully declining to give the precise number of months. But I had no doubts about it whatsoever. And I'm an incredibly indecisive person. I'm trying to buy a house now, and I'll say to my friends, 'Maybe it makes sense to buy this fixer-upper,' and they'll all say, 'You can't.... Imagine how long it'll take you to decide what to do with it.' Which is really true."
And where is she moving from? After reportedly earninq the power to ask for $1.5 million per picture, Jennifer still lives in a tiny apartment she first started renting 10 years ago when she was single. ("I'm a little behind the times," she deadpans.) In 1997, when she gave birth to Kai - his father is photographer David Dugan, with whom Jennifer never tied the knot but remains on amicable terms-she gave her son the one proper bedroom and look the loft, which has no door. Until recently, she also kept her television on the floor.
It must be hard, I realize, for Paul to have torn himself from his community in London to come to the United States and settle with her. She nods. "Paul loves New York," she says. "But he's really uprooted. He doesn't know anyone here. But he's met some nice people he's desperately pursuing friendships with." She laughs again.
When Jennifer first told Kai that she was pregnant, he fretted. "He asked, 'What if this baby does things better than I do?"' she says. It's a natural question for a child to ask, of course, and Jennifer answered it as best as she knew how, telling him that as human beings, we all have our own strengths and weaknesses. But he needn't have worried. Jennifer credits Kai with something that perhaps no one else could have done: giving her a sense of professional purpose. After she had her son, Jennifer has said she "re-chose acting," following years of passive involvement in her field.
She was born in upstate New York but spent most of her childhood in Brooklyn Heights, where she went to Saint Ann's School, a private, progressive school that turns out accomplished kids in droves. Though she was terribly shy, a friend of her parents who worked in advertising intuited something about Jennifer when she was 10. Soon her mother was taking her to photo shoots. At 11, she got her first movie break when she was cast in Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in America.
Though she often worked as an actress during high school, she was a fine student. Still, when Jennifer went to Yale, she discovered that her perfectionist tendencies were getting the best of her, driving her into the library for hours on end. She transferred to Stanford, where things were mellower. After a year she left there, too, and went to Los Angeles to make more movies. She did not care for the city very much.
"I just feft ... observed a lot." she says. "Observed in a way I don't really feel when I'm here [in New York]."
I ask Jennifer if she ever had any constructive conversations with women in Hollywood about how to avert the all-too-commonplace 60th-birthday eventuality, the facelift. She shakes her head. "I can't fathom ever doing that, personally" she says. Ask me in 30 years. But I'd hope by the time I'm that age, I'll be able to graciously accept how I change."
The turning point in Jennifer's career didn't come until Inventing the Abbotts, released the year Kai was born, or perhaps Mulholland Falls which came out the year before. From there, it was a steady climb to cruising altitude, with a series of well-chosen art films, including Pollock, Waking the Dead and Requiem for a Dream. And then, of course, came A Beautiful Mind.
One would think an Academy Award would be a sufficiently heavy object in Hollywood to pound open a few doors. But Jennifer concedes, with refreshing bluntness, that it has not improved her job offers very much. "There is still a hierarchy, a food chain, that I am not at the top of. I not necessarily the greatest box-office draw."
No matter. When Ang Lee, one of the finest directors of women today (see Sense and Sensibility and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) was casting The Hulk, he knew he wanted Jennifer to play Dr. Betty Ross, the film's scientist heroine. She was delighted to accept, though a little puzzled about how to handle the role. "The film itself will be conscious of its genre," she explains, "but Ang didn't want the characters themselves to be conscious of their comic-book world."
Presumably, Jennifer figured it out. Anyway, she now has greater concerns on her mind, like house-hunting (in neighborhoods that have few celebrities) and caring for her son. She takes him to and from school each day; they jump on the subway - "not as a political statement, just as a convenience if the traffic's really bad" - and go to Central or Battery Park. "I really want him to be a grounded kid," she says. "It's hard to do that in this business, because people do treat actors differently."
When Jennifer is not looking after Kai, she is continuing her own education. Recently, she took a painting class at Parsons and a creative writing class at The New School; she also does a lot of prenatal yoga.
Because of her creative writing class, I ask if she'd like to write a screenplay one day. "I have no imminent plans to write," she says. And what about directing? She shrugs. "I have no imminent plans to direct." She gives a seductive grin and looks me directly in the eye. "Nothing," she declares, "is imminent."
Jennifer Connelly can currently be seen in The Hulk.
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