Jennifer Connelly Biography

It's a hoary old saying in the acting world that "It took me twenty years to be an overnight success". Hoary, but so often true. And, weirdly (being as she's still in her early thirties), it's true of Jennifer Connelly. To most people, her Oscar for A Beautiful Mind, wherein she played the wife of Russell Crowe's schizophrenic mathematician, came completely out of the blue. Maybe they'd spotted her before, as Jackson Pollock's mistress in Pollock. Maybe they'd seen her as a junkie prostitute in Darren Aronofsky tortured Requiem For A Dream. More likely they hadn't. Nearly everybody hadn't.

So most would think Jennifer Connelly is this year's Chloe Sevigny or Hilary Swank - a couple of cool indie movies and BANG! But this is far, far from the truth. For Jennifer Connelly has been working since the age of 10, acting since she was 12. A child star, she's spent the last 15 years struggling to get back to where she started - pretty much at the top.

Jennifer Connelly was born Jennifer Lynn Connelly on the 12th of December, 1970 (same day as Madchen Amick), in Woodstock, New York, just over a year after the famous music festival at Yasgur's farm. Jennifer Connelly mother, Eileen, ran an antiques shop in Woodstock, while her father, Gerard, sold children's clothes in New York City. They were fairly well-to-do and owned another property at Bellport, Long Island. When Jennifer Connelly was four, they moved to Brooklyn Heights, just across the Brooklyn Bridge from Manhattan, Jennifer Connellycompleting her primary and secondary education at St Ann's school.

Jennifer Connelly education widened quickly. An advertising executive friend of the family suggested that 10-year-old Jennifer Connelly  being extraordinarily good-looking, might make a great child-model. So,they went looking for representation, and found it in the prestigious Ford Agency and, after school, Eileen would take littlJennifer Connelly into the city to auditions. Jennifer Connelly was very successful, appearing in many newspaper and magazine ads, and in TV commercials. These days, Jennifer Connelly claims she can remember very little about this, in fact recalling only one ad - for Scott's toilet paper.