Culture: My beautiful career

 

 

By Sarah Baxter

The Sunday Times (London)

Sunday February 10, 2002

 

She's been in some strange and terrible films, but now Jennifer Connelly's role as the feisty wife in A Beautiful Mind has won her a Golden Globe and earnt her a little respect. By Sarah Baxter

You know how it is. One minute you are Jennifer whatshername, that attractive, talented actor who was in the film nobody can quite remember, and the next minute everybody in Hollywood is your best friend. This is what happened to Jennifer Connelly after she walked off with a Golden Globe for best supporting actress a couple of weeks ago, and she is game enough to admit it.

The level-headed actor, who is elfin in person but statuesque on screen, says: "I've never had so many flowers in my apartment in my life. There's been a lot of, 'I always said to your agent that I loved you,' and 'I've always said that you were ... whatever.' We'll see what happens. If it begets more work, it's fantastic." Connelly had barely sat down at the awards ceremony when she was called on stage. "It felt strange because it happened so quickly. There was no fanfare, nothing. I hardly had time to catch my breath. I was shocked and immensely flattered, because I was convinced I wouldn't win."

She was up against some tough British competition in the shape of Maggie Smith, Helen Mirren and Kate Winslet &emdash; and will face all three again for best supporting actress at this year's Bafta awards &emdash; but her film, A Beautiful Mind, had prizewinner stamped all over it. It won four awards that night, including best actor for Russell Crowe, best screenplay and best film. Since the Golden Globes, American takings have passed the $100m mark. It's that rare phenomenon, a mainstream movie about a challenging subject that has turned into a box-office success. Schizophrenia on campus is not much of a saleable commodity, and yet the story of John Nash, the Nobel-prizewinning mathematician who spent a lifetime battling his demons, belongs in essence to that tried-and-tested formula: triumph over tragedy. Add some well-observed period detail, mainly at Ivy-League Princeton during the cold war, and some considerable acting by Crowe as Nash and by Connelly as his loyal and fiercely intelligent wife, and the Oscars now beckon.

We meet in a restaurant in downtown Manhattan, where she chides me for suggesting the laurels were predictable. "There have been a few movies that were highly anticipated and seemed to have all the makings of a winner, yet for some reason they fell flat on their face. There's no foolproof recipe." She shies away from describing A Beautiful Mind as her best film &endash; "I'm a pretty tough critic of everything I've been involved in" &endash; but loved her demanding role.

Alicia Lardes was a beautiful scientist from a Salvadorian family who was studying at MIT, where she attended lectures by Nash. He was known to be an ill-at-ease, tetchy scholar who was determined to make his mark on his subject with an original theory. "She wasn't fazed by him at all," says Connelly. "She was a black sheep herself, studying theoretical physics at that time. When I'd talk to her about her memories, she wasn't always serious. She'd say, 'Oh, but he was so-oo handsome, and he had the most beautiful legs.'" It was only after their wedding that Alicia learnt Nash was schizophrenic. Connelly had to switch from playing a bold and flirtatious student to an impoverished, embattled wife and mother. "I loved those scenes where she isn't so nice and isn't always the perfect wife. She goes into her own fear for a stretch, when she snatches the baby away from him without a word, and has her own sort of breakdown."

Connelly shares with the real Alicia an intelligent, angular beauty, but the film, based on a biography of Nash by Sylvia Nasar, is anything but accurate. The oddball mathematician had a mistress and a son before he married Alicia, and they divorced after she committed him to an asylum. All this has been airbrushed from the film. But she took him back decades later when he had nowhere else to turn, and they remarried after he won the Nobel Prize in 1994.

"Ultimately, we did a fictionalised version of her, but I felt the kernel of their story was preserved," says Connelly. "Their break-up and reunion was another reason why it was so important for me to play their emotional break-up, so it didn't appear as though she was the wife who never questioned him all along."

One of the first things Alicia, now in her seventies, asked her was whether Crowe was as sexy as everybody said he was. Ever since his triumph in Gladiator, the Australian star has been getting the nudge-nudge, is he a goer treatment that actresses are more used to receiving. "Women are like that with him," says Connelly. "It's really interesting." Despite tabloid rumours that she dallied with him, she insists: "I'm not that kind of girl."

She has hardly seen Crowe since the end of shooting. "We got along really well, we have similar working styles in that we love to spend a lot of time on research, and we were very easy and familiar with each other, which is probably what got misinterpreted, but we never spent time together outside work. When I'm working, I do my job, I stay focused, I retreat to my own corner and do my own thing. I'm pretty quiet."

Crowe gave the finger to a Princeton student who snatched a photograph of him from her window and has sounded off about overprivileged undergraduates; Connelly used to be one of them. She attended an Ivy-League college, Yale, though she left there for Stanford and never finished her English degree. She likes to describe actors and directors she admires as "smart" and is clearly no intellectual slouch.

As a child she went to one of New York's elite private schools, but found the transition to college difficult. "I was really tyrannical with myself and spent hours in the library. I had no balance whatsoever." Connelly believes she became obsessed with overachieving because she missed so much schooling while growing up. She was a beautiful 10-year-old with raven hair and luminous eyes when some fashion-business friends of her parents suggested she did some modelling work on the side.

Before long, she had become a baton-twirling majorette on a corn flakes packet and was posing for sewing patterns and catalogues almost every day. When she was 11, she was chosen by Sergio Leone to play the young ballerina whose dancing captivates the boy Robert De Niro character in the magnificent Once Upon a Time in America.

Legend has it, and she does not demur, that Connelly was cast because she had a similar nose to Elizabeth McGovern, who played the adult role. "It was a beautiful movie, but it had nothing to do with me," she remembers. "I didn't even know how to dance and had to be given lessons."

For years, it remained her most memorable part. At 14, she was in Labyrinth, a fantasy directed by Jim Henson and starring David Bowie, and it was downhill all the way. A succession of feeble teen flicks did not help her confidence. "If I'm working on something that is mediocre, or worse than mediocre, I'm miserable. I'm tortured by the process of making it, and I'm tortured by it afterwards." The highlight of Connelly's adult career was the fantasy adventure The Rocketeer, in which it was said of her that she had "the curves in the right places". It was not what an observant, well- educated actor wanted to hear.

She is now 31 and was given something of a backhanded compliment by Ron Howard, the director of A Beautiful Mind, when he explained why she was selected to play Alicia. It wasn't just that she looked the part, he said. "She's been around this business so long, she could hold her own in tough, emotional scenes with Russell. I needed a real veteran to play opposite him." For Connelly, though, it's a badge of pride that she has come through the worst. As she got pickier, the parts improved. "I've had so many misses that I'm now much more stubborn and patient about what I want to do. It just got to a point where I felt it wasn't worth it any more. I'm sure I'll make more missteps, but I feel like I've found my niche. I'm happy now."

Kai, her four-year-old son, has brought joy into her private life and has given her the confidence to turn down bad films. "I feel much more comfortable in this age bracket," she says. Although she is no longer with Kai's father, they are equally passionate about him, she insists. She also has a boyfriend, Josh Charles, a television actor whom she has been seeing for two years &endash; another reason why a fling with Crowe was out of the question.

Her next starring role is in The Hulk, directed by Ang Lee. Yes, the Incredible Hulk, the victim of radiation and all that hokum, is about to meet the maker of Sense and Sensibility and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. It could be simply that Connelly has the right curves all over again to play the green monster's girlfriend, or more likely, that it is going to be an adventure film like no other, with the tragic Hulk as a flawed hero. Shooting begins in May and she has already begun to develop her character.

"It could be really strange and interesting. There is such a lyrical sensibility to Ang Lee. He's the reason I'm doing it. I've never known him to cast an uninteresting female character. Why presume it's going to be like all the other superhero movies? There are 13 ways of looking at a blackbird," she says, quoting Wallace Stevens, the American poet.

If The Hulk turns out to be another awardwinner, Connelly could have her pick of Hollywood. Obstinately, however, she has resisted moving there and says she'll be staying in New York for as long as she can imagine. "My family's here. My friends are here. I grew up here. It's got such vitality. You leave the house and &endash; pow! &endash; it's there, with all its amazing resources." And she isn't that comfortable in LA. "So many people are employed in the movie business. It's a little disconcerting. I can move through that world just fine, but parts of it are really comical and absurd." Like those "friends" who always said she was going to ... storm the world. q

A Beautiful Mind opens on February 22

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Copyright 2002 Times Newspapers Ltd.