Jennifer gets it together

Jennifer Connelly has got her life back on track.

10 April 2012

Jennifer Connelly used to doubt herself. She felt her figure was too voluptuous for Hollywood, so she wore a swimsuit under her clothes to flatten her chest.

A fear of divorce made her prolong her engagement for five years, before her fiancé, actor Bill Campbell, finally ran out of patience. Her career seemed to be going nowhere, too.

After success as a 15-year-old in Labyrinth, directed by Jim Henson, she trod water through a succession of little-watched movies such as Mulholland Falls (1996) and Dark City two years later.

Then she looked set to disappear altogether having given birth to son Kai, now eight, with photographer David Dugan. He lived up to her fears of rejection by leaving her shortly after the birth of their son and she did not work for two years.

So what has happened in recent times? Connelly, now 34, has a booming career, having won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for the 2001 film A Beautiful Mind. She's married to British actor Paul Bettany, also 34, and they have a son, Stellan, two next month. She's even restyled herself with an assured Manhattan sophistication.

We meet in The Dorchester while Bettany plays with their children in Hyde Park. A dark-blue dress covers her pencil-slim frame and almost matches her steady violet eyes. She seems confident and elegant. 'I realised that I needed to do something drastic about myself,' she recalls. 'I was a single mother of 30, my career wasn't going in the right direction and I needed to give myself a chance.

'I was a kid when I started at 11 and, for me, it was a matter of turning up on time, knowing my lines and doing what the director told me. I wanted everything to be nice and to keep everyone happy, and I took that attitude into adulthood. In the end, it was not quite enough.'

She then took her biggest on-screen risk, with the part of a drug-addict prostitute in Darren Aronofsky's 2000 film Requiem For A Dream. Her controversial role even included a lesbian scene.

It paid off so handsomely that, suddenly, Hollywood directors wanted to work with her in a variety of different roles, whether in the blockbuster Hulk 2003) or last year's classy House Of Sand And Fog. But it was A Beautiful Mind, playing Russell Crowe's wife, that changed her life for ever.

She met co-star Bettany on set but, at that point, she was dating Josh Charles, known for the American drama series Sports Night. 'Both Paul and I were in other relationships, so did not get together during filming,' she says.

'We've both had enough on-set relationships to know that they don't work and you need to walk away from them. But we began talking on the phone after we went our separate ways, in a slightly guarded way. I felt that there was something interesting going on and it could perhaps lead to something else.'

They next met at the 2002 Bafta Awards, at which Connelly won Best Actress for A Beautiful Mind. By this time, they were both single, and they got together almost immediately, but they didn't live together until their wedding on New Year's Day, 2003.

'It was the first marriage for both of us and both of us are rather old-fashioned. We went to Scotland and married in a house we hired near Edinburgh, with about 10 people. It was a rainy Scottish winter. After all my caution about marriage, I was proposed to, married and had a child in the space of a year. I had never been happier in my personal life and I felt things had finally clicked.'

But, at this point, Connelly took another on-screen risk, by plunging into Dark Water, a horror film in which her character is threatened with the death of her young daughter. 'It may seem a form of madness,' she says. 'Stellan was only five months old.

But I never felt safer, personally, to launch myself in to something like this. You need a strong home and marriage to make those challenges on screen.' And Connelly had plenty to put herself through, swapping a luxurious home in Manhattan each day to be driven to Roosevelt Island, a ghastly succession of tower blocks.

She spent day after winter day drenched in the brown water that mysteriously floods the small apartment, which her fiery character, Dahlia, has been forced to take with her daughter after being dumped by her husband. 'It was like entering a different time zone,' she says.

'Roosevelt Island is put together like Lego. There are elevators skipping floors and secret levels. I did think, after spending so many hours screaming along a corridor, covered in brown slime, "Why on earth did I agree to this?" I could have been at home with my five-monthold baby and my lovely husband.'

The role came after a long wooing process by director Walter Salles (Central Station and The Motorcycle Diaries) with a script based on the Japanese hit film directed by Hideo Nakata. Hollywood struck gold with Nakata's The Ring, so why not again with Dark Water?

The stellar cast also includes John C. Reilly as the estate agent, Pete Postlethwaite as a spooky janitor, Dougray Scott as her husband and Tim Roth as a lawyer. 'You get offered something like this,' says Connelly, 'and you think, "This is what I've always wanted."'

Dark Water opens Fri 22 Jul.

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