Since then, Jennifer Connelly has worked with Dario Argento, Darren Aronofsky or Ang Lee and has won several prestigious awards, such as an Oscar and a Golden Globe for her great role in the movie A Beautiful Mind.
Discreet in her personal life, serious and mysterious in appearance, the Top Gun actress turns 50 today.
Ennifer Lynn Connelly was born in upstate New York on December 12, 1970. Her mother was an antique dealer and her father a clothing manufacturer. Connelly grew up in Brooklyn Heights. At one point, her father wanted to quit dressmaking and they moved to Woodstock, according to Vogue magazine in 2007.
The actress remembers the years in that place that she evokes the hippie culture of the sixties as "mythological", in which she wandered, built forts and made "potions with plants and berries". “My kids do that now. It's not like I had this really private childhood, so now I'm establishing the opposite for my kids," she told the magazine.
A friend of the Connellys, who worked in the advertising world, suggested to her parents that they could take her to castings when the actress was still a child. “I started working at ten. I certainly think I became less carefree, more precocious, "said the actress in this regard.
Her first jobs were as an advertising model in newspapers and magazines. She later moved into television advertising, and in 1984 she got her big break.
With the help of Sergio Leone, she gave life to Deborah Gelly in a small role in Once upon a time in America, a film about how two Jewish friends become mobsters in full prohibition, at the beginning of the 20th century, in the suburbs of Manhattan. .
“I have a little bit of a block about how it happened,” she told Vanity Fair in 2002 about her start in acting. “I'm not intentionally hiding it, honestly. I remember what I did, for the most part, but I don't know why. I had no aspirations, I didn't have movie posters in my room, I wasn't a fan of movies. I liked Evel Knievel and animals. And I liked science and English,” she added.
A year later she became the protagonist of Phenomena, directed by Dario Argento. Although the film met with positive reception in Europe, it did not reach widely with American audiences.
Two years later she reached the turning point in her career with the film in which she established her position in Hollywood: Labyrinth, a fantasy-themed film directed by Jim Henson and starring Connelly and David Bowie.
From there, the actress appeared in different titles such as Burning Lips, by Dennis Hopper, from 1990; The Rocketeer, from 1991; Abuse of Power, in 1996, or Inventing the Abbotts, in 1997. With the new millennium just released, she participated in another of the most notable films in her filmography, Requiem for a Dream, by Darren Aronofsky.
Just a year later, Connelly landed the role that won her an Oscar and a Golden Globe, that of Alicia Nash, a Salvadoran-American physicist, in A Beautiful Mind, in which she shares the lead with Russell Crowe and which was directed by Ron Howard. The film tells the story of John Forbes Nash, a schizophrenic American mathematician who won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1994.
And in May of this year, Netflix premiered the series Snowpiercer, starring Connelly and based on the film of the same name by acclaimed South Korean filmmaker Bong Joon-ho, who won an Oscar this year for his film Parasite. The series is about survival, injustice and class struggle aboard a gigantic train that travels the planet, in the middle of a post-apocalyptic and dystopian scenario in which the world has frozen.
In her personal field, Connelly has always stood out for putting distance between her private life and her professional life. She therefore normally does not answer questions about her family in her film promotion interviews and she has a reputation for being a cold, distant and mysterious person.
“I don't usually play characters who are the happy-go-lucky girl next door. I've done dramas with women who are, you know, grieving," she told Vogue. “I think that has shaped the perception that people have of me. But I don't think it's necessarily a reflection of how I live my life."
Since 2003 she shares her life with fellow actor Paul Bettany, and they have two children. She is also the mother of another son from a previous relationship with photographer David Dugan, with whom she did not marry.
