She's not your average bubbly Hollywood actor. In fact you could call Jennifer Connelly - aka Mrs Paul Bettany - just plain glum onscreen. She tells Donald Clarke how she fought to be taken seriously, but sometimes yearns to be viewed more frivolously
Hollywood has always enjoyed carving personas for its star performers. Katharine Hepburn, blue of stocking and blood, was the flinty east-coast patrician. Faye Dunaway, an Appalachian in the city, was clever but not quite as clever as she looked. Bette Davis was a bitter maiden aunt. Shelley Winters was your pal. Marlene Dietrich was foreign.
US cinema has not, however, asked many of its leading ladies to be just plain glum. Step forward - or, rather, slouch mopily forward - Jennifer Connelly. In a series of recent films the weary-eyed actor, whose stretched lozenge of a head might have been designed by El Greco, has become the industry's most compelling misery guts. She won an Oscar for weeping elegantly as Russell Crowe lurched towards dementia in A Beautiful Mind and seemed, if anything, even more upset when Eric Bana turned into the Hulk. She was a distraught and ultimately devastated junkie in Darren Aronofsky's Requiem for a Dream. And let's not start on House of Sand and Fog. It's a career, I suppose. But, unsurprisingly, Connelly, who turns 35 this year, has expressed occasional concerns about the murky light in which she has been shrouded. In a recent interview she joked that she yearned to be "taken less seriously". Sadly, Walter Salles's impressively atmospheric Dark Water, a horror film so dank that the usherettes should hand out warm towels, is unlikely to brighten her image much.
"There is a tendency to try and categorise actors," she says. "Maybe there has always been an interest in identifying actors with particular personalities. But it seems particularly prevalent now. Actors are seen as being a particular type rather than just somebody who does a job."
So do her friends regard her as solemn? Do the merry flee when she enters a room? "I don't think so," she says, not quite laughing. "Though, hang on. Where are my friends? Where have they all gone? No, actually I spend most of my time making a total ass of myself - running up to my kids and singing crazy songs to them."
You can understand why a director might regard her as a suitable candidate for mourning. Dressed in a short lilac dress incorporating a large bow at breast level, the painfully thin, quietly spoken actor does have a withdrawn, disconnected quality. One can imagine her draped in a shawl keening through a Lorca play or wrapped in a toga whining about the death of Agamemnon. But the reticence appears to stem from shyness rather than depression. Think back to her acceptance speech at the 2002 Oscars. Faltering and embarrassed, she looked like a woman whose puppies had just been run over.
"When I was delivering the speech I was really discombobulated," she says. "I kept looking up and seeing the light flashing at me, telling me my time was up. I couldn't believe there was no podium to hide my little bit of paper. Is it pretentious to learn your speech or pretentious to not learn it? Then I find myself thinking that I don't want to be taking this award from these other nominees who I really respect: Judi Dench and so on."
It sounds ghastly. "It was beyond intimidating. It was one of those situations where you don't know what to do with any part of yourself: your hands, your thoughts. And while you are having these problems you are on display. I am really bad. If we go to dinner and there are more than three new people I really have to narrow it down. I have to sit at one end of the table and focus on just one person. If I am in a round-table interview with five journalists or more, my heart rate drops and I just get so quiet."
This bashfulness is all the more surprising when you consider that Connelly has been in the public eye since she was a child. Raised in Brooklyn, the daughter of an Irish-American clothing manufacturer and a mother who is now a "cranial-massage therapist", she made her first screen appearance in Sergio Leone's opulent 1984 gangster epic Once Upon a Time in America. After her fine performance as a kid who grows up to be Elizabeth McGovern - Connelly claims she got the part because she had the same nose as that quintessential 1980s actor - the precocious moppet went on to star in Dario Argento's Phenomena, one of the Italian master's finest horror extravaganzas. What does she remember of those films? Was she intimidated to be in such company?
"No, I wouldn't say I was intimidated," she says. "I wasn't scared by Dario; he was a lot of fun. I wasn't scared by making that film. And, look, I really didn't know who Sergio Leone was at that stage." It sounds as if she was more confident at 11 than she is now. "I certainly remember my approach to making movies was very different then," she says. "My level of involvement wasn't as high. It wasn't something I had chosen myself. It wasn't something I had wanted to do myself. For me then, doing the job was just about showing up on time, knowing my lines and keeping the director happy. It was about keeping the producers happy rather than getting within the role." continued overleaf
So acting wasn't something she chose for herself? Images announce themselves of pushy parents stealing away their only child's innocence. Connelly firmly denies that she was ever compelled to take any roles against her will, but she seems unsure exactly how Mr and Mrs Connelly manoeuvred her towards show business.
"I honestly don't remember," she says. "What I have always said - and I think it is accurate - is that friends of my parents were in advertising and that was how I found myself doing ads for kids' clothes, the covers of sewing-pattern books and that sort of thing. I think the audition for Once Upon a Time in America might have been the first I ever did."
It may just be Connelly's contained manner, but she gives the impression she didn't much enjoy being a teenage star. Yes, everybody was very nice. Yes, they all treated her well. But she never expresses much excitement. What about working with David Bowie on Jim Henson's camp fantasy Labyrinth? "I wasn't really sure who he was at that stage. But he was fun. About a year later the significance of who he was dawned on me. I was a weird kid; I wasn't somebody who was up with popular culture. Actually, I'm still not."
Like Jodie Foster before her - and Julia Stiles and Claire Danes in more recent years - Connelly geared down her acting career in her late teens to concentrate on education. She enrolled at Yale in 1988 and remained there for two years before dropping out to start again at Stanford. Sadly, she failed to graduate from that university either. This is still a source of regret.
"I was young and felt that acting wasn't what I had chosen. It wasn't mine. Yet I was still giving it so much time. School became something I could claim as my own. I could then prove to myself and others that this was something I could do myself. How that manifested itself was that I became this unbalanced, neurotic student."
The next few years seems to have been a messy time for Connelly. The Disney adventure The Rocketeer got her face on posters in 1991 but failed to launch her into a grown-up career. She embarked on a serious relationship with the film's star Bill Campbell and, if contemporaneous reports are to be believed, was even briefly engaged to him. Further romances followed with Josh Charles, another actor, and the photographer David Dugan, the father of her first child.
She did make a few passable films in the 1990s - Inventing the Abbotts for Pat O'Connor and Mulholland Falls for Lee Tamahori - but it wasn't really until 2000 that the elegant miserabilist began to emerge. In that year she appeared as a determined political activist in Waking the Dead and as a numb drug addict in Requiem for a Dream. The latter performance culminated in a disturbing sequence in which Connelly's character performs asordid sex routine for the entertainment of sleazy businessmen.
"I had to fight to even be considered to audition for that, and I auditioned twice," she says. "I knew it was important, and I really wanted to do it. I didn't hesitate at all. That particular scene was never a concern, because I knew that it really was a part worth doing. Darren [ Aronofsky] and I talked about it in depth, and we agreed that it would be a clean operation and that it would be done with great delicacy."
Connelly admits that it was not until the release of Waking the Dead and Requiem for a Dream that she felt she gained possession of her career. The millennium year also saw her rub up against the man she would marry. Connelly met the stringy English actor Paul Bettany on the set of A Beautiful Mind, when both were in serious relationships, but they have made it clear to interviewers - very, very clear, you understand - that their affair did not start until a year or so later.
What it was about the star of Wimbledon and A Knight's Tale that persuaded her up the aisle? She begins squirming. "You're suggesting I was so ancient and had been around so long," she laughs. "Oh, I don't know. He is just so ugly and he is so untalented that he makes me feel talented and good looking. No. He is such good fun. He is a mucky angel, a rare breed."
Two years ago Connelly gave birth to the couple's first child, Stellan (named for Bettany's Dogville co-star Stellan Skarsgard), and, ever since, eager that one parent be available throughout the day, they have tried to ensure they are never both shooting at the same time. Last year Bettany told me he was looking forward to being the "set bitch" on Dark Water. How did he take to the role? "I tried to get him to wear a collar, but he just wouldn't do it," she says before turning all gooey. "He was doing his best impersonation of a sexy dad, with the baby strapped on and pretending he hadn't had time to shower, so that his hair was beautifully tangled."
Dark Water, cunningly adapted from Hideo Nakata's original Japanese mood piece by Salles, the director of The Motorcycle Diaries, might be the murkiest, gloomiest film you will see all year. Connelly plays a young mother who moves into a haunted apartment block on New York's Roosevelt Island - the picture features impressive location work on that obscure strip of land - after she breaks up with her aggressive husband.
Connelly, whose first son, Kai, is now seven, must have been intrigued by the idea of playing a mother raising a child away from the father. "I think it was less specific than that. Though, yes, I can certainly relate to that," she says. "What resonated more was what that woman was going through more generally. There is this parallel, allegorical story about the ghosts we all carry with us. In her case it is to do with her mother and the fact that she was abandoned by her. There is this fear that she will carry that unhappiness on to another generation."
And on she goes in her gentle, grave voice. Unhappiness. Ghosts. Abandonment. She tells the story so well it is little wonder that directors cloak her in darkness rather than pointing her at brash romantic comedies. Kate Hudson and Cameron Diaz needn't worry.
Dark Water will open on Aug 19