Jennifer Connelly Biography

Jennifer Connelly
Biography

Birth name
Jennifer Lynn Connelly
Date of birth (location)
12 December 1970,
Catskill Mountains, New York, USA

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This fresh-faced former child model made her film debut at age 12, seen in flashbacks as the young incarnation of Elizabeth McGovern's character in Sergio Leone's gangster epic "Once Upon a Time in America" (1984). Horror cultists may remember her as the girl who has a peculiar relationship with the insect world in Dario Argento's Italian fear opus "Creepers" (1985).

      Jennifer Connelly subsequently was featured in mostly forgettable teen fare, with the possible exception of Jim Henson's "Labyrinth" (1986), in which she was overshadowed by David Bowie and a cast of Henson creatures. That same year she was the bright one among a trio of friends--Byron Thomas, Maddie Corman--in the lightweight "Seven Minutes in Heaven". Connelly traded on her attractive looks as the only innocent among Southern schemers in Dennis Hopper's thriller, "The Hot Spot" and as the voluptuous town beauty in the teen comedy "Career Opportunities" (both 1990). She was perfectly cast as a 1940s Hollywood starlet who got the guy in "The Rocketeer" (1991; Connelly and co-star Bill Campbell also enjoyed an off-screen relationship as well).

      Although she was seemingly on the verge of a major career, Connelly had difficulty finding that one role to catapult her into the public eye. She stopped performing for a while to pursue an Ivy League education and when she decided to resume her career, it was because she had rediscovered a passion for acting. The actress made a rare foray into TV with the 1993 TNT movie "The Heart of Justice", in which she essayed a femme fatale. John Singleton cast her as an earth mother lesbian in "Higher Learning" (1995) while she opted to play another woman of questionable virtues as Nick Nolte's doomed mistress in "Mulholland Falls" (1996).

      Connelly delivered a fine turn as Eleanor, the self-styled bad girl middle sister of a trio of beauties who all succumb to the charms of the town's bad boy (Billy Crudup) in "Inventing the Abbotts" (1997). She next undertook the challenging role of a woman who may or may not be real in the sci-fi thriller "Dark City" (1998). After another brief hiatus for the birth of her son, Kai (with then-boyfriend David Dugan, a photographer) in 1997, Connelly returned to the big screen in force with three high profile art-house films in 2000. She was again a woman of mystery, this time a former radical haunting her old lover (Crudup) in "Waking the Dead". In Darren Aronofsky's harrowing "Requiem for a Dream", Connelly played a wannabe fashion designer with a nasty coke habit who willingly submits to debasement in order to score drugs. She also was the other woman in the life of the abstract artist in Ed Harris' biopic "Pollock". In addition to her busy film career, Connelly made her debut as a series regular in the short-lived NYC-set serial "The $treet" (Fox, 2000), which purported to be a behind-the-scenes look at a brokerage firm.

      The actress had one of her best-reviewed roles as the patient and loving wife of an eccentric math genius diagnosed with schizophrenia (portrayed by Russell Crowe) in "A Beautiful Mind" (2002), loosely based on the real-life relationship between Alicia Nash and her husband, Nobel laureate John Forbes Nash Jr. Connelly racked up numerous end-of-the-year accolades and garnered a well-deserved Academy Award as Best Supporting Actress.

After 20-odd films, Connelly landed squarely on the A-list after A Beautiful Mind, a status that will almost certainly be cemented by her headlining role in 2003’s The Hulk, the eagerly anticipated live-action film version of the classic comic The Incredible Hulk, directed by Ang Lee.

In January 2003, Connelly wed her "Beautiful Mind" costar Paul Bettany. Their first child is a son named Stellan, born in 5 August 2003.