Jennifer Connelly: How often does a women get to play the hero?

Interview, Feb, 2002 by Julianna Margulies

Let's call her a late bloomer. Twenty two films and nearly two decades into a prolific, if not widely lauded career, Jennifer Connelly is breaking out.

Connelly arrived with great promise as a 14-year-old, impressing in the epic drama Once Upon a Time in America (1984). Then for years, due to a combination of bad choices and bad luck, she toiled away in largely B-grade movies, alternating between teen drivel and sci-fi camp. But by the late 1990s, a grown-up Connelly had begun to emerge in a number of grown-up films: the sleeper hit Inventing the Abbotts (1997); the darkly poetic Waking the Dead (2000); the desperate Requiem for a Dream (2000). And now her starring turn in the current A Beautiful Mind, opposite Russell Crowe, sees Connelly at the top of her game. Her Alicia Nash character, wife of Crowe's Dr. John Nash, could have easily been as dated as the Cold War era in which she lives--a stay-at-home wife and mother sacrificing her career for her schizophrenic husband--but Connelly plays her with an unmistakably modern strength and sass. Here, she talks with fellow actor Julianna Margulies. SCOTT LYLE COHEN JULIANNA MARGULIES: Hi, Jen. So you're in New York City right now?

JENNIFER CONNELLY: I am. I'm sitting on my windowsill. It's one of those perfect late fall days.

JM: I'm in Dublin, where it's raining and cold. [laughs]

JC: Is it pouring?

JM: Actually, it's been really mild. I'm just slightly homesick, that's all. Oh, I'm supposed to tell you Aidan Quinn says hello. I'm doing this movie [Evelyn] with Aidan and Pierce Brosnan.

JC: [laughs] Aidan is so nice. Tell him I say hello. And lucky you. I love Ireland.

JM: This is your motherland, isn't it?

JC: My dad's family, yeah. So gorgeous. I was there years and years ago, and I wanted to stay.

JM: Yeah, I could see living here. It's incredible. Now, I just read the script for A Beautiful Mind, which I'm glad I did because instead of simply seeing it, I get to feel more internal with it. I absolutely loved it. I felt like such a loser because I was all by myself in my hotel room sobbing at the end.

JC: [laughs] I did that, too.

JM: Alicia Nash is such a great role! It was wonderful to see a well-rounded female character. Finally! [both laugh] What did you like most about playing her?

JC: Well, first of all, I had a very strong emotional reaction to the script when I read it. I think it's remarkable. And Alicia--she's so tough. Just the fact that she was studying theoretical physics at MIT in the '50s, I mean, that was huge. She has a remarkable strength to her.

JM: Is she still alive?

JC: She is. She's alive, and so is John [Nash], and they're still together.

JM: Did you meet her?

JC: I did. Before we started shooting I talked to her. It's a kind of crazy, great experience to be able to play a real person, and meet them.

JM: It's also incredibly scary, because you really want to get it right.

JC: And it was also slightly confusing because it took a while [for the actors] to find our way, because the script strays from Alicia and John's lives.

JM: How so?

JC: There are little things that weren't completely accurate, like our Alicia is a painter--the real Alicia isn't. So it was a bit strange in the beginning, trying to figure what was real. At first I said to Ron [Howard, the director], "I'm going to cut my hair off because she has short hair," and he's like, "No!" And I said, "But, I'm playing her," and he said, "No. We're making our own characters. We're telling our own story, inspired by their story."

JM: Had she and John read the script?

JC: Yeah. They read it.

JM: Were they happy with it?

JC: As far as I know, they were. They both seemed happy that we were telling their story, and happy with the way we were telling it.

JM: It's such a fine line. The movie I'm doing over here, Evelyn, is based on a true story, and the other night we met the woman it's about, and the writers kept trying to keep the actors away from her. [laughs) They didn't want her filling our ears with things in her life that weren't in the script.

JC: Right, exactly. Who is she?

JM: Her name is Evelyn Doyle. The story is about her father, who in the '50s won back his children, Evelyn being one of them, in the courts at a time when single parents weren't given the right to take care of their own children.

JC: Wow.

JM: But speaking of "real people," and I don't mean to sound Hollywood, but to me, your character. Alicia, was the hero in this story. She's the only one who stood by John and saw it through to the end. I mean, any other woman would've left.

JC: Oh, I agree. Alicia's an incredibly heroic woman. I was really happy about how she was written, and also how the script was preserved in the way that Ron directed it. He made her human. You see her struggle, you see her break down, you see her rage and her frustration, and it's real, you know? She's incredibly dedicated and committed, and she makes huge sacrifices for John because she loves him so much.

JM: And on top of it all, she has a child. You're a mom--could you function knowing that you couldn't, at certain times, trust the father of your child?