Growing up on set put Oscar-winning actor Jennifer Connelly on the fast track to Hollywood fame. But despite her success, one of her lasting regrets was not finishing college – and, she says, it’s still on her to-do list…
Jennifer Connelly is on a Zoom call from her home in Brooklyn, jetlagged after attending Louis Vuitton’s pre-fall 2024 show in Shanghai, which does not bode well: she is known to have been reticent in past interviews, and sometimes while working. When she made A Beautiful Mind, the 2001 movie for which she won an Oscar for playing the wife of schizophrenic mathematician John Nash, the co-producer Brian Grazer was unnerved by her reserve. “It was hard for me to get to know her on the set because I’m so emotional,” he told a writer in 2001. “She’s very serious. She’s not silly. She doesn’t have that buoyancy.”
It is a relief, then, to find Connelly to be thoughtful and lovely and erudite, happy enough to discuss her life and career. I ask if Grazer’s description is one she’d recognise.
