Jennifer Connelly

Jennifer Connelly (born December 12, 1970, Catskill Mountains, New York, U.S.) is an American actress who won an Academy Award for her moving and complex portrayal of Alicia Nash, the wife of John Nash (played by Russell Crowe), a brilliant mathematician who won the 1994 Nobel Prize for Economics, in A Beautiful Mind (2001), a film that depicted Nash’s battle with paranoid schizophrenia.

Connelly spent most of her childhood in the Brooklyn Heights neighbourhood of New York City, and she began modeling at the age of 10, appearing in print advertisements and television commercials. Her first film appearance was in a small part in Sergio Leone’s gangster epic Once Upon a Time in America (1984). As a teen, Connelly had leading roles in several minor films, including Jim Henson’s children’s film Labyrinth (1986). After studying English at Yale University and drama at Stanford University, Connelly attracted notice with her performance in the Disney adventure film The Rocketeer (1991).

Connelly acted for several years in music videos and other minor films, the most notable of which was the noir crime drama Mulholland Falls (1996), before she garnered rave reviews for her evocation of drug addiction and degradation in Darren Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream (2000). She then appeared in the Jackson Pollock biopic Pollock (2000). Connelly earned a BAFTA Award and a Golden Globe Award as well as an Oscar for A Beautiful Mind. She went on to star with Ben Kingsley in House of Sand and Fog (2003) and with Leonardo DiCaprio in Blood Diamond (2006). Her other films included Reservation Road (2007) and The Day the Earth Stood Still (2008). Connelly portrayed the wife of Charles Darwin (played by her real-life husband, Paul Bettany) in Creation (2009) and the wife of the biblical figure Noah (Crowe) in Aronofsky’s epic Noah (2014).

In 2016 Connelly starred with Ewan McGregor in American Pastoral, an adaptation of the novel by Philip Roth. She then played the wife of a firefighter in Only the Brave (2017), which was inspired by the true events of the Granite Mountain Hotshots’ efforts to contain the Arizona wildfires during the summer of 2013. Her next film was the science-fiction thriller Alita: Battle Angel (2019), based on a manga novel. Connelly then starred in Snowpiercer (2020– ), which was her first TV series since The $treet (2000–01). She returned to the big screen in 2022, starring with Tom Cruise in Top Gun: Maverick (2022), a sequel to the 1986 blockbuster.