Look homeward, angel

 

 

By Michael Specter

Vogue

November 2004

 

Jennifer Connelly has moved back to Brooklyn, her hometown, with her movie star husband (Paul Bettany), two gorgeous kids, and Oscar in tow. As Michael Specter learns, this alluring screen icon of doom and gloom leads a life that is anything but.

Jennifer Connelly has a serious request to make. "I want to be taken less seriously," She told me late one afternoon this summer. We had been riding our bicycles in Brooklyn's Prospect Park until the sun forced us beneath the shade of an oak tree. "Well maybe that sounds weird," she added. "I mean I don't only want to be taken seriously. I would like people to think of me as playful. As Fun. At least not as grim or morose." Stopped for moment and laughed at herself. "I never thought I would say this, but my main professional goal right now is to be cast as a character who is not dark or depressing. You know, something that does not involve weeping or psychosis or fear. I would just love to do a comedy, but sometimes all I get are grim, serious scripts." Connelly fixed her misty green eyes on me and said, slowly with a hint of a southern accent (which she does not normally possess) "I mean really, do I seem that grim to you?

No, grim is not among the words that come rushing to my mind as I meet Jennifer Connelly. Beguiling, yes. Arrestingly beautiful, even. But grim? Far from it. Connelly acts like she is a recently married woman with two young children, a fabulous job, a newly purchased house and a husband - Paul Bettany - who is one of the most appealing actors working in films today. Not exactly the profile of a woman cloaked in a shroud of darkness. In fact if she weren't Jennifer Connelly she might pass for an upscale working mom out for a break on a summer Sunday: For our bike ride she wore a pair of faded Seven Jeans, a black T-shirt, and bright green Converse sneakers. Her auburn hair fell passed her shoulders and framed a single diamond she work on a chain around her neck. Except for the pendant and a thin wedding band, she was unadorned. She even wore no helmet - a laps she attributed more to the failure of good intentions than to vanity. "I just got the bike," she said when I began to bore her about the dangers of riding without a helmet. "I know you are supposed to wear them. I will. I will. But I am not used to it. Sometimes I get so caught up with the kids and Paul and everything else in life that I forget what I am required to do." That's about as morose as she gets. Yet, if Connelly were judged solely on her past few years' worth of film roles, and the intensity with which she approaches them, then words like grim and pensive would not only make sense, they would be hard to avoid.

Starting with her 2000 film role in Waking The Dead , in which she played a determined young activist who dies assisting members of the Chilean resistance, to last years House of Sand and Fog, in which she starred as a suicidal former alcoholic and drug addict, Connelly established herself as the definitive despondent screen actress of her generation. Nobody does soulful desperation or terrifying decline better. After Waking The Dead , Connelly was cast in Requiem For A Dream , a film version of Hubert Selby, Jr.'s, relentlessly depressing novel about addiction and loss in Coney Island. Connelly gave a devastating performance as junkie Marion Silver, a young woman who degrades and humiliates herself to the point where she trades sex for drugs, abandons her tenuous grasp of humanity, and in the final, gut-wrenching scene, puts on a naked lesbian-themed sex show for a bunch of leering, repulsive businessmen. Although she appeared as a topless hellion in Inventing The Abbotts , which was produced by Ron Howard, it was Requiem that convinced him to cast her as Alicia Larde Nash, the wife of schizophrenic subject of A Beautiful Mind . "I knew that she was smart and thoughtful, and of course lovely," he told me, "But that was such an unbelievably courageous and effective role she played in Requiem. And it was on the strength of that more than any other film that I talked to her about A Beautiful Mind. She was interested, and when she auditioned she won the role, it was as simple as that."

Connelly received an Academy Award for that film. Many of those who had followed her career were not surprised. "I have been a fan of Jennifer's since her first movie." Walter Salles told me recently. Salles is the revered Brazilian director whose first English language film, a remake of the Japanese psycho-horror tale Dark Water, in which Connelly stars, will be released this winter. Connelly who is in virtually every scene, plays a mother who has just gone through a divorce and bitter custody fight; and while Connelly said she was first reluctant to appear in a scary movie, she was mesmerized by the idea of working with Salles and by the complexity of emotion that her character is forced to confront. "Jennifer is like a Stradivarius: she can do virtually anything," Salles said. Her range is astounding. She is very intuitive, but she can be very Cartesian if that is needed. More than that, the girl is fearless. There are only a few actresses who risk it all the way Jennifer does. It was a thrill to direct her in this movie. I would work with her again yesterday."

Connelly is 33: she has been making films for two decades, but her career certainly didn't start with praise or promise. It began almost by accident at the age of eleven, when she played Elizabeth McGovern's character as a child in Sergio Leone's Once Upon A Time In America. (She was cast, the thinks, because her nose happened to look exactly like McGovern's.) Connelly would make nothing of similar quality for many years. "It just so happened that Once Upon A Time In America was made by a great director. Believe me, I had no idea who he was, or what he had done, or what I was doing." She said. Connelly was a kid who never considered becoming an actress until she was one. Her second film, Phenomena, was directed by Dario Argento. It was a B-grade horror flick. "My parents passed on it, and when I came back from school and when they told me I cried. I really wanted to go to Italy. So that's how I made that film. I never gave five minutes thought to the role." That is perhaps understandable. (as was her parents initial decision) because in the film she played the daughter of a movie star who has been sent to Switzerland to attend an all-girls school she detests. Her classmates shun her because they are unable to come to terms with her strange and special gift: the ability to telepathically communicate with all insects.

It went on like that for most of her teenage years, and Connelly often emerged as the only redeemable commodity in a series of flops. She appeared in Jim Henson's Labyrinth , for example, and even as an adolescent she overshadowed the rest of the cast, which consisted of a bunch of Muppets and David Bowie. Later, in her teens, she surged forward into another series of unfortunate roles in which she played a half-dressed babe with galloping sex appeal and enticing figure. "I was not terribly rebellious. I was an overachieving hyperdisciplined kid. I wanted to do well and have everyone like me... To me... To me, success was 'Everyone thinks I am very nice and I show up on time and act very mature.' I never thought about it as a creative endeavor. For me the creative endeavors were really private. So I wrote really terrible goth poems about my suicide pacts with my teddy bears, and that was my creative outlet Making movies is where I tried to be a grown up.

Connelly grew up in Brooklyn; her father was Irish-American and worked in the garment industry, but he was also a bit of a bohemian. When Jennifer was eight, her father moved the family to Woodstock. By the time she was ten, they were back. "My parents were not pushy, driving stagemanager types at all," she said. "They mostly let me do what I wanted to do." They are now divorced: her father returned to Woodstock, and her mother, who is a cranial-massage therapist, at the Esalen Institute, lives in Big Sur. (It's true that my parents occupy two of the great hippie outposts of America. But it is more of a coincidence than anything else. We were a pretty basic family.") Except for the years when she lived in Woodstock, Connelly attended St. Ann's - one of New York City's most progressive private schools from kindergarten though high school. When she was ten, a friend of the family suggested she audition for modeling jobs, and soon she was working (I was the geek on the Danskin package," she told me with a slightly embarrassed giggle.)

There followed a series of catalog and print ads that led to television work. Then she met Sergio Leone, who was looking for a girl her age to dance in his epic gangster film. She worked steadily after that, but she was never sure that she wanted a career in films: and by the time she enrolled at Yale University in 1988, her doubts were not only about movies but about herself as well. Connelly was an only child, and she quickly developed the imagination required to deal with solitude; but also left her feeling awkward in crowds of people her own age. "I had always been a kid whose parents had to tell me to stop doing homework and go to sleep. I don't know why I was like that. They weren't. I don't remember when it started. I was a shy kid who found herself doing photo shoots at age ten. Maybe it was some kind of reaction to that. Or maybe it's just sort of in my nature. But I was a driven little girl. I remember I would visit my grandmother - she lived in Florida, and we would wake up at nine and she would have already been out for a five mile walk, and gone to the doctor's office where she worked to do some filing, and she had come home and was making breakfast and planned the whole day out. And I thought WOW . So is this genetic? Maybe."

Connelly is well educated but aggressively unpretentious. "There are some actors and actresses who are smart," Ron Howard said, "and they wear it like a badge; it's a role for them. Jennifer isn't that way at all. She enjoys her intelligence, and it makes her thoughtful as an actress and as a person." Connelly basically sees herself as a geek. When she was a teenager, her heroes were Evil Knievel and the Fonz. She loved school, and her seriousness helped her gain admission to Yale, where she studied literature. But at one point her seriousness got out of hand. "I didn't know how to be in college," she said. "I was so singularly obsessed and dedicated, but it was to much." She rattles off her basic qualities: "Overserious. Maudlin. Teenager. I was terribly old when I was younger. If I look at it now, sure, I wish I took everything less seriously and had more fun. But I didn't."

It was not a great time for her film career either. "When I was at Yale and reading Harold Pinter, I was offered Career Opportunities " - a thankfully forgotten comedy in which she plays a rich girl who gets locked in a Target store with a janitor. "I thought, Well, this is kind of like a Harold Pinter play. And not at all accepting what the movie was. And I was just miserable while making it. The problem I had then was that I never wanted to see the movies I was in. But I had a very hard time getting considered for movies I really wanted to be in.

She worked herself into what she described as "a bit of a funk," so she took some time off, went out West, and decided to enroll at Stanford, where she became a teenage athlete. She began to run obsessively as she used to study. "I am obsessive-compulsive and a perfectionist," she said matter of factly. "I don't say it with pride. My nickname on the cross-country team at Stanford was 'Death Grip' because I was so slow. Basically, I was the team mascot." She still ran six miles a day, a habit she kept up for years. (These days she runs around Prospect Park, about three and a half miles.) Connelly left Stanford after a year and has never graduated from university. ("I have a tiny bit of regret about that.") She moved to Los Angeles but could never settle there. It wasn't the right kind of life for her. She missed the structure of New York, the subways, the noise. She returned to the city and, for the first time, began to struggle for roles in films that she actually wanted to make.

"The truth is that incredibly rare that you find a script that moves you," she said. "Often they are pathetic." At least these days she gets to choose among the best of them. Five years ago, she had to work for weeks just to meet with the director and producers of Waking The Dead . Then she auditioned three times before she landed the role. Next came Requiem , followed by a small part as doomed mistress of Jackson Pollock in the Ed Harris film Pollock . It was A Beautiful Mind, though, that changed her life. She loved working with Ron Howard, whom she describes as "nice as a man can be without becoming saccharine." She found the often difficult Russell Crowe a source of theatrical inspiration. "He is obsessed. He wants everything to be perfect. He questions everything. But so do I." Crowe is equally complimentary about her. "Jennifer likes the truth of things, the core, and she sees people quite clearly," he said. "Luckily for most of us, she is too polite to point out realities we prefer to ignore." That said, Crowe admits that if she's in the right context Connelly will "give you the truth, the deep, rumbling, essential truth." That is what she did with A Beautiful Mind. She won the Oscar, repositioned her career, and far more important, found her husband, the British actor Paul Bettany, who appeared in the film. "Not bad," she said. "If you can get an Academy Award and a husband out of one film, it's not a bad experience."

Both she and Bettany were in other relationships when they met, and they did not become involved until later. They now have a child, Stellan, born last August and named for Swedish actor Stellan Skarsgard, with whom Betanny worked on Lars von Trier's Dogville. Connelly also has a seven-year-old son Kai, from a previous relationship with the photographer David Dougan. Connelly and Bettany seem incredibly happy together. A bright smile spreads across her face when her cell phone indicates that he is on the other end. When we were in the park, Betanny suddenly appeared on bicycle with baby Stellan sitting docilely in a child seat. Bettany is extremely tall, soft spoken, and polite. We chatted briefly; he didn't want to horn in on his wife's interview. They made plans for dinner then he rode away, though not before asking Connelly how much she intended to ride and, when she said maybe a lot, making fun of her propensity for endless exercise. ("He thinks I have that American fetish with working out, and he just laughs at me and lights another cigarette.")

The couple recently moved to Brooklyn, a return to the ground of Connelly's youth. "I never know how I feel about that," she said. "Sometimes it freaks me out. I'll actually see people I grew up with. Other times, it is very comforting." For years she had an apartment in the West Village, but when she and Bettany decided to live together they needed more space. "Paul is big and he is grumpy in the mornings, and there was nowhere for him to turn. I fantasized about a big house with room for an easel to painting and for guests, and yet we ended up here, where I started."

In the year they have lived there, though, they have not furnished the house at all. The place still looks like a vacant warehouse. There are no tables, chairs - practically nothing. They don't own a DVD player, and borrowed beds from Connelly's father when they guests stay not long ago. "It's because I'm a perfectionist," she said sheepishly. "A pained one. I want furniture and I want it to look right, but then I think about what to buy and I want the perfect furniture. And I just can't pull the trigger on the thing. So I end up getting nothing. It's the same with clothes. I go into a store and I get panicked because I don't know what my identity is."

Partly, she says, this is a reflection of her ambivalence about the culture in which she operates. "I gave up worrying about what roles I get when I lost out to Drew Barrymore for Firestarter , I think when I was eleven or twelve," she said. "I worry about other things... about getting lazy or sucked up into other things I abhor. Our culture is bred to consume rather than to create. It is one of the things that scare me about raising kids here. I try to do just the amount I need to get by in the business because it's a reality hypocritical not to. But I do fantasize about snatching my family up and going to live by the sea somewhere where people make things by their hands. And live a bit more sanely."

Connelly is not sure what she is going to do in the near future. She is focusing on family and traveling with her husband while he makes his next film. They spend a lot of time deciding what to do professionally and have committed to themselves to alternating films, so they don't become separated for to long. "Paul is up next," she said. "So I get to be the set bitch now. He was my set bitch in Toronto when we made Dark Water."

A few weeks-ago, after returning from a mosquito-plagued camping trip in Vermont, Connelly met me for lunch at Da Silvano in Greenwich Village. It's one of those restaurants where people go principally to see and assess one another. The place was empty when we arrived and the owner was thrilled to see Connelly; he asked her to sit prominently at a table on the sidewalk or at a table in the window. She declined politely. Instead, we settled into a table in the back, where it was dark and quiet.

Connelly was agitated by the morning's political news: more attacks by the Republicans on John Kerry. "Bush has been a disaster, and absolute disaster, and our country is in a really bad position, and this is a very dangerous time. We need to get out of this spot, and I hope that Kerry can help us do that. I think it is imperative that Bush loose this election. Imperative." Connelly was strongly against the war in Iraq and marched in the first protest in New York City. She said that President Bush helped create an atmosphere in America that scared her.

I asked her if she felt that being a movie star - and a famously beautiful one at that - made it hard to take seriously her concerns about the shallow consumerist bent of American society. After all, she does earn a living through the business of celebrity worship. "Well, I know I do, but it all bothers me," she said. "For instance we are now in the culture of cosmetic alteration. Yes, we don't wear corsets anymore, but there is still an accepted tyranny that idealizes what a woman should look like. I think it is really easy to get sucked into that. I mean, walk into a magazine store and look at the covers. Most of the women have basically the same body; and let's face it, in most of the magazines these days the standard picture of a woman is in a bra or bikini. So it's hard for people to keep their head straight and not want to chase that version of themselves. And I don't think I am exempt. I wish I were. I hate myself when I struggle to get out of the house and think Oh, God, should I wear this or not? And I think, Just shut up, but I still do it. I would love to rid myself completely of that side of myself."

When she received her Academy Award for A Beautiful Mind, she was so thin and look so different from past appearances that many people assumed she had undergone cosmetic surgery. "Nope. I was really stressed. I didn't completely realize how I looked until I saw photographs, and thought, Oh shit, I look quite thin in that picture. I had been traveling a lot, and I felt very uncomfortable with the whole process. A lot of moving around. I was running a lot and not feeling well. Just anxiety and stress. And that is where I wound up: tired, and dazed and skinny. It's not where I want to be, and I don't intend to be there again."