Jennifer Connelly

Jennifer Lynn Connelly (born December 12, 1970) is an American actress. She began her career as a child model before making her acting debut in the 1984 crime film Once Upon a Time in America. After a few more years of modeling, she began to concentrate on acting, starring in a variety of films including the horror film Phenomena (1985), the musical fantasy film Labyrinth (1986), the romantic comedy Career Opportunities (1991), and the period superhero film The Rocketeer (1991). She received praise for her performance in the science fiction film Dark City (1998) and playing a drug addict in Darren Aronofsky's drama film Requiem for a Dream (2000).

Connelly won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her portrayal of Alicia Nash in Ron Howard's biopic A Beautiful Mind (2001). Her subsequent films include the superhero film Hulk (2003), the drama House of Sand and Fog (2003), the horror film Dark Water (2005), the psychological drama Little Children (2006), the thriller Blood Diamond (2006), the science fiction film The Day the Earth Stood Still (2008), and the romantic comedy He's Just Not That Into You (2009). In the subsequent decades, she took on supporting roles in Aronofsky's biblical epic film Noah (2014) and in the action films Alita: Battle Angel (2019) and Top Gun: Maverick (2022). She also starred in the science fiction television series Snowpiercer (2020–2024) and Dark Matter (2024).

Connelly was named Amnesty International Ambassador for Human Rights Education in 2005. She has been the face of Balenciaga and Louis Vuitton fashion advertisements, as well as for Revlon cosmetics. In 2012, she was named the first global face of the Shiseido Company. Magazines, including Time, Vanity Fair, and Esquire, as well as the Los Angeles Times newspaper, have included her on their lists of the world's most beautiful women.

Connelly was born on December 12, 1970, in Round Top, a hamlet in Cairo, New York, United States. She is the only child of Ilene Carol (née Schumann; 1942–2013), an antique dealer, and Gerard Connelly (died 2008), a clothing manufacturer. Her father was a Catholic of Irish and Norwegian descent, while her mother was Jewish and was educated at a yeshiva. Connelly's maternal ancestors were Jewish emigrants from Poland and Russia. Connelly was raised primarily in Brooklyn Heights, where she attended Saint Ann's School. Her father suffered from asthma so the family moved to Woodstock in 1976 to escape the city smog. Four years later, they returned to Brooklyn Heights, and Connelly returned to Saint Ann's School.

After graduating from high school in 1988, Connelly went to Yale University to study English literature. She has described herself as a conscientious student who "wasn't really concerned with having a social life or sleeping or eating much. I was really nerdy and pretty much stayed in the law school library, which is open 24 hours, most of the time I wasn't in class." After two years at Yale, Connelly transferred to Stanford University to study drama. There, she trained with Roy London, Howard Fine, and Harold Guskin. Encouraged by her parents to continue with her film career, Connelly left college and returned to the film industry the same year. Her parents divorced in 2000.

When Connelly was ten years old, an advertising executive friend of her father suggested she audition as a model. Her parents sent a picture of her to the Ford Modeling Agency, which shortly after added her to its roster. Connelly began modeling for print advertisements before moving on to television commercials. In an interview with The Guardian, she revealed that, after having done some modeling, she had no aspirations to become an actress. She appeared on the covers of several issues of the American teenage magazine Seventeen in 1986 and 1988. In December 1986, she recorded two pop songs for the Japanese market: "Monologue of Love" and "Message of Love". She sang in phonetic Japanese as she did not speak the language.

When her mother began taking her to acting auditions, a then 11 year-old Connelly was quickly selected for a supporting role as the aspiring dancer and actress Deborah Gelly in Sergio Leone's Jewish gangster epic Once Upon a Time in America (filmed 1982–83, released 1984). The role required her to perform a ballet routine. During the audition, Connelly, who had no ballet training, tried to imitate a ballerina. Her performance, and the similarity of her nose to Elizabeth McGovern's, who played the character as an adult, convinced the director to cast her. Connelly described the film as "an incredibly idyllic introduction to movie-making".

Connelly's first leading role was in Italian giallo-director Dario Argento's 1985 film Phenomena. In the film, she plays a girl who psychically communicates with insects to pursue the killer of students of the Swiss school where she has enrolled. During filming, she was attacked by a chimpanzee and was bitten on the finger. Connelly next had the lead in the coming-of-age film Seven Minutes in Heaven, released the same year. In a retrospective interview, Connelly said, "Before I knew it, [acting] became what I did. It was a very peculiar way to grow up, combined with my personality." She described feeling like "a kind of walking puppet" through her adolescence, without having time alone to deal with the attention her career was generating.

Connelly gained public recognition with Jim Henson's 1986 fantasy Labyrinth with David Bowie, in which she played Sarah Williams, a teenager on a quest to rescue her brother Toby from the world of goblins. Although a disappointment at the box office, the film later became a cult classic. The New York Times, while noting the importance of her part, panned her portrayal: "Jennifer Connelly as Sarah is unfortunately disappointing. ... She looks right, but she lacks conviction and seems to be reading rehearsed lines that are recited without belief in her goal or real need to accomplish it." In 1988, she began work as a ballet student in the Italian film Etoile which was released in 1989, and portrayed college student Gabby in Michael Hoffman's Some Girls.

In 1990, Dennis Hopper directed The Hot Spot, in which Connelly played Gloria Harper, a woman being blackmailed. The film was a box office failure but Connelly was praised. Stephen Schaefer wrote for USA Today, "Anyone looking for proof that little girls do grow up fast in the movies should take a gander at curvaceous Jennifer Connelly [...] in The Hot Spot. Not yet 20, Connelly has neatly managed the transition from child actress to ingenue". During an interview with Shaeffer, Connelly commented on her first nude scene: "The nudity was hard for me and something I thought about...but it's not in a sleazy context". In the same year, director Garry Marshall considered her for the role of Vivian Ward in Pretty Woman, but ultimately felt that she was too young for the part.

Connelly's next film was the 1991 romantic comedy Career Opportunities, starring alongside Frank Whaley. People criticized the film for exploiting Connelly's body; the marketing included a life-size cardboard cutout showing Whaley watching Connelly ride a mechanical horse, with the caption "He's about to have the ride of his life". In an interview with Rolling Stone, Connelly said that a Yale professor brought it to her attention and "... that wasn't something I felt all that comfortable about". The big-budget Disney film The Rocketeer (1991) followed later that year, but failed to ignite her career. She played Jenny Blake, a Disney dilution of what was in the original work a Betty Page persona, here the aspiring actress girlfriend of stunt pilot Cliff, "the Rocketeer". New York characterized the film as "pallid" but said of her performance, "Connelly is properly cast; she has the moist, full-to-the-cheek-bones sensuality of the Hollywood starlets of that period, but she's a little straight". She appeared alongside Jason Priestley in the Roy Orbison music video for "I Drove All Night" the following year, directed by Peter Care.

Connelly next appeared in Of Love and Shadows, a 1994 Argentine-American drama film written and directed by Betty Kaplan starring Antonio Banderas. In 1995, director John Singleton cast Connelly as a lesbian college student in Higher Learning. She then appeared in the 1996 independent film Far Harbor as Elie, a prominent person in a Hollywood studio who writes a screenplay based on her traumas.

In 1996, Connelly followed up with the neo-noir crime thriller Mulholland Falls, which featured the murder of Allison Pond (Connelly), mistress of General Timms (John Malkovich), and the investigation by a group of detectives led by Maxwell Hoover (Nick Nolte). New York wrote about a scene that reveals the link between Timms and Pond: "This footage is actually dirty. That is, it makes us feel like voyeurs when looking at it, but it's so juicily erotic that we can hardly look away". Regarding the nude scenes in the film, Connelly said: "It kind of shocked everyone who knows me that I wound up doing this movie, because I had always been so careful about nudity, it was very much a part of this character and I couldn't be coy or guarded or self-conscious—otherwise it wouldn't work. It was sort of a challenge I wanted to take on, I guess". Mulholland Falls was a box office failure.

She began to appear in small-budget films which garnered praise from critics, such as 1997's drama Inventing the Abbotts, set in the late 1950s, in which she played the part of Eleanor, one of three daughters of the town millionaire, Lloyd Abbott. The critic from Entertainment Weekly thought Connelly gave a strong performance; writing she "raises the stakes any time she's on screen". Co-producer Ron Howard, who would later direct Connelly in A Beautiful Mind, said, "She not only was beautiful and seductive but gave some difficult psychological moments in the film a lot of depth and complexity. She had an extraordinary combination of talent and beauty, and I guess I stored that information in the back of my brain".