Perfect Jen

 

 

by Tom shone

Harpers and Queen (UK)

September 2005

 

Jennifer Connelly has been acting in films since she was 11. Despite enduring exploitation and sexualization in the trashy teen flicks of the eighties, she survived. And, having taken in Yale, Stanford, a hot British actor husband and a change of heart, she emerged in 2001, triumphant, with an Oscar. Tom Shone meets the dark queen of US indie cinema.

Jennifer Connelly took her seat in the Kodak theatre next to Cameron Diaz on the night of the 2001 Oscars, looked up at the stage, and concentrated on how OK she’d be with not winning.
“I worked very hard to do the thing I was told to do,” she says,
‘which is to get to the point where you do it for the love of it, and it’s not a competitive sport, and winning doesn’t mean ‘I’m better than Judi Dench. It was so bizarre and so surreal. You think, “Is it pretentious if I think about winning? Is it pretentious if I don’t? Is it pretentious if I prepare something? Is it pretentious if I don’t?”

When Connelly won the Oscar for the Best Supporting Actress - for her role in A Beautiful Mind - she delivered what went down as one of the most low-key speeches in recent memory: no Sally Field hysterics, no Halle Berry waterworks; just a few words of thanks, read in dulcet tones from a shaking scrap of paper. It caused many raised eyebrows in Hollywood, where an acceptance speech isn’t really an acceptance speech unless you effusively thank your entire gene pool.

‘It’s very confusing to someone who is not used to being incredibly demostrative. You’re being asked to comment on a very loaded situation, in a very public forum, live, with lots of people watching you and analysing your every move. I tend to go very quiet in those circumstances,’ she says when I meet her amid mahogany and glass of New York’s Soho House to talk  about her new film, and the first role she’s chosen since winning the Oscar.

‘It changed things,’ she says, settling into the sofa and tucking
a jet-black curtain of hair behind her ear. ‘I’m more interested in working now; I feel I have more to give. I’m impelled to work on things I feel passionate about. It’s about revising my wish-list of what I want to do with my life, how I want to spend it and who I want to be.’

It has taken a while to get to this point. Before her recent success in the mainstream, she swam up-current with the indie film crowd and, before that, had a career as a teen and child actor. She has something of the spooky composure of an  ex-child-star-guardedness that results from having the world take a chunk out of you at an early age. She is polite, but wary; when finished with a question, she levels you with a laser-like stare-much accentuated by those ferocious eyebrows of hers- as if to say: ‘Next!’ But gradually, she relaxes her guard -  a process familiar to anyone who has seen her  performances with their mixture of wounded intensity and luminous emotion.

On-screen, she is a beguiling combination of head and heart. In A Beautiful Mind, she nursed Russell Crowe’s tormented mathematician back to reality in more ways than one: if people didn’t realise Crowe’s performance as John Nash for the  disaster that it was - a Tupperware party of ‘genius’ tics and mannerisms - it was thanks to the woman looking intently into  his eyes and telling him: ‘This is real’. She soothed another troubled genius in Hulk (2003), and in both films radiated twice the intelligence off the men she cradled; one doubts whether Crowe ploughed through Nash’s papers on game theory as Connelly did for her role as Alicia. At her audition, she was so enthusiastic she could barely finish. ‘I didn’t want to stop,’ she says. ‘I remember, we finished and I was like, “Anything else? Any other scenes? Any? Please?”

‘I tend to get a bit carried away,” she says. ‘I remember thinking, if only I could do this job, I’ll never ask for another decent job again. I’m a bit all-or-nothing. I’m a bit of cyclical that way. There was a time when I threw myself into doing things with my hands; then it was walking and climbing and skiing; I still love all that, but I don’t need it the way I once did.’ It was on the set of A Beautiful Mind that Connelly met her future husband, her co-star, English actor Paul Bettany. They have a two-year-old son, Stellan, together with Connelly’s eight-year-old son Kai, from a previous relationship.

‘He ribs me constantly,’ she says of Bettany, who is clearly the more laid-back of the two – puncturing Connelly’s more sombre tendencies with doses of English sarcasm. ‘He’s infected the family with the British sense of humour. Kai impersonates him.’  I wonder how she juggles the schedules of two working actors and two children. ‘It’s a nightmare - a nightmare,’ she says, only half-joking. ‘I hate paperwork. But Paul - the bastard - is even worse at it than I am, so I wind up being the paper-bearer. I spend so much time looking at pieces of paper and scheduling: Kai’s schedule and Paul’s schedule and my schedule and Stellan’s schedule…But it works out okay.’ While Connelly was working on her new film, Dark Water, for instance. Bettany and their son were on the set everyday, and when they were shooting in Toronto, eight –year-old Kai would fly up to visit on his days off school and over the holidays.

Directed by Brazilian auteur Walter Salles, who directed The Motorcycle Diaries, Dark Water is a horror film with a high pedigree. Connelly plays a single mother, struggling to keep custody of her daughter after she has moved into what is easily the most desolate tower block ever seen on film - ‘The circle of hell Dante forgot to write about’ as Connelly puts it.

‘I’m usually really critical, really opinionated’, she says. It’s very rare that I come out of a film I’ve been in not feeling a bit pukey; but I came out feeling Ok. I think that is because Walter is an exceptional director – really elegant.’ The experience of being a mother herself gave her ‘a head start’ at playing one on-screen. ‘Working on a film isn’t about acting out my own fantasies,’ she says, ‘but of course it’s informed by my own experience. I happen to have a son who is the same age as the girl in the film, and I happen to  have raised my son for number of years, and I happen to have gone through a separation from his father. I didn’t do it because I thought, “Oh, yeah, I’m going to tell my story,” but it reflects my experience. ‘I think motherhood unleashes this level of love that is so exquisite and unprecedented – at least it was completely new to me when Kai was born. There’s nothing safe about it, there’s nothing routine about it, and there’s nothing mundane about it.’

As Connelly’s character submits to some family demons of her own, the hook of the film turns out to be whether it is possible for us to be better parents than our own mothers and fathers. Connelly nods in vigorous agreement when I  suggest this. ‘It’s
about our inheritance: how we struggle with it, how we accept it or turn a blind eye to it. It’s about identifying and questioning your legacy. It’s something I’ve looked at. I didn’t want to walk around letting “The skeleton of habit alone uphold the human frame”, she says, paraphrasing Virginia Woolf.

It was that way with acting for a while – it was a habit she had, something she just found herself doing. ‘I was just really young, and crowd- pleaser kid, one of those precocious kids who  thinks that doing well will keep everyone happy – turning up on time, that sort of thing. I just kept doing it because of… habit. I felt like it was my job. I didn’t get rebellious until much older. I was trying to make peace.’ At the age of 10, she did her first modelling work. ‘I wore really embarrassing things like leotards’, she says, ‘and jumped up and down in dresses on a   trampoline.’ At 11, she landed her first film role, in Sergio Leone’s Once Upon of Time in America (1984). Before she knew what was happening, she had a film career on her hands.

When I ask which parent it was who pushed her into acting, she pleads the fifth Amendment. ‘I have no recollection,’ she says.
‘I don’t really know. I’ve made up an answer that is probably close to the truth: the story I tell is that a friend of  the family asked me to do something for her advertising, and it led to something else. But it didn’t come from me, because I wasn’t theatrical. I was very shy. I didn’t quite feel in control. I don’t think I was able to pinpoint what it was that was making me so uncomfortable, and I wasn’t self-aware enough to say, “Hey, I think I’m being overly sexualised and I’m a teenager and  I’m not in control and I resent it.” All I knew was that I was little bit embarrassed, a bit anxious. I kind of hid myself. I showed up  but I didn’t show up, so I was sort of there, but there was nothing sacred in it. I’d do it and then I would go home and  be a painter and write macabre poetry – that was where I was more invested, creatively.’

There followed a string of forgettable films such as Labyrinth (1986 ), Some Girls (1988), The Hot Spot (1990) and – the crowning indignity – the John Hughes teen comedy Career Opportunities (1991). ‘I feel like there’s this weird version of me in video stores that has nothing to do with my sensibility,’ she says of some of her choices. ‘I  don’t want to see those films, and how strange is that? They’re not all bad, but there’s something not quite right about that.’ She went to Yale to study English. ‘I was determined to prove myself as a student who didn’t make movies, and I became the hugest geek. I didn’t turn up to the freshman dinner- I stayed in the library studying, and my room-mate was like, “Shouldn’t you be partying?” I said,
“No, I’m OK”. – you know trying to get the thorns out of my sides. I studied in the loft of the library for 24hours. So serious!’

After Yale, she went to Stanford University to study acting, and in her mid-twenties, oversaw a sea change in her attitude to her career. ‘I thought, what happens if I fight hard to try to get myself into the sort of films I want to see? So that is what I decided to.’ The result was a string of roles in which Connelly took a blowtorch to her’ sweet little girl’ image in films such as  The Rocketeer (1991), and  established herself in the indie- film sphere. The new, improved Connelly first showed up in Waking the Dead (2000), but it was Darren Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream (2000), in which she played a junkie, that Connelly really shone; if ‘shone’ is the right word for a heroine who turns tricks for Wall Street gang-bangers to pay for her drug habit.

‘It was fun,’ Connelly insists, laughing. ‘I loved going to work. People said, “Wasn’t it depressing?  No; it was fantastic, really great. I had a blast. I wasn’t you know, arriving home carrying the weight of this pain.’ It was Requiem for a Dream that caught director Ron Howard’s eye – the actress he’d cast a few years ago in Inventing the Abbotts seemed to have come of age – and led to Connelly being cast in A Beautiful Mind opposite Crowe.

As for their British co-star, she can’t really remember how he first struck her. ‘He was always lurking in the background – this curly-haired apparition,’ she says.’ I’d met him on the first day of read-throughs, but we were both in relationships and we didn’t spend time together until the end of the film. It wasn’t until a while later that we hooked up. And pretty quickly after we got together, we decided to get married, we decided to have a kid. It was all pretty decisive. And I’m really indecisive, but it was pretty clear.’

They got married on New Year’s Day in 2003 at Gilmerton House in East Lothian – near to where Bettany’s father, actor Thane Bettany, has a home. At first, the couple moved into Connelly’s apartment in New York’s West Village, but when their son was born, life started to resemble a laboratory experiment. ‘It was ridiculous,’ she says. ‘Christmas was a mass crisis: making room for the tree, nights spent anxiously sketching where I could put the furniture to accommodate the tree, where I could put the presents…’

The couple have just moved into a large house in Brooklyn, where they can pursue their lives with certain amount of anonymity.’ I still have fairly private life,’ says Connelly. ‘We’re not at the Brad and Jen level of scrutiny.’ She would never, she says, consider a move to Los Angeles to be closer to the hub of Hollywood. ‘It would be so difficult doing what we do and raising the kids there. Here, we ride the subway everyday. We walk from point A to point B, rather than being shuttled from your nice car to your nice home to your nice school to your nice friend’s house; where everyone is in the movie industry, and everywhere you go movies are the topic of conversation.’

Coming up next is a camping trip with the boys in Vancouver. When I ask her how long they are going for Connelly’s four-schedule brain goes into overdrive. ‘Well, Kai has school,’ she says, ‘but he has Monday and Friday off, and can play hookey on Thursday, so we’ll leave on Wednesday and come back on Monday.’ After the holiday, she’ll start work on Little Children with Kate Winslet. Somehow, this agenda-juggling stream of consciousness epitomises Connelly deftly contrasting her life as a mother and wife with the enormity of her acting success. ‘I’m not  a mover and a shaker,’ she says. Hollywood disagrees. With one Oscar under her belt, Connelly’s rise means she will never have to practise being OK with not winning again.