Jennifer Lynn Connelly (born December 12, 1970) is an American film actress and former child model. Although starring as early as a teenager in films such as Once Upon a Time in America, Labyrinth and Career Opportunities, she gained critical acclaim following her work in the 2000 drama Requiem for a Dream, and the 2001 biopic A Beautiful Mind, for which she won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, as well as the BAFTA and Golden Globe awards.
Connelly was born in the Catskill Mountains of New York, the daughter of Ilene, an antiques dealer, and Gerard Connelly, a clothing manufacturer who worked in the garment industry.Connelly's father was of Irish Catholic and Norwegian descent, and Connelly's mother was Jewish, a descendant of immigrants from Russia and Poland (Connelly's mother was schooled in a yeshiva). Connelly was raised in Brooklyn Heights, near the Brooklyn Bridge, and attended St. Ann's private school, except for four years the family spent living in Woodstock, New York. One of her father's friends was an advertising executive, who suggested that she audition at a modeling agency.
At the age of ten, Connelly's career started in newspaper and magazine ads, then moved to television commercials. These led to movie auditions and her first film role was as "young Deborah Gelly", a supporting role in Sergio Leone's 1984 gangster epic, Once Upon a Time in America, filmed mostly in 1982 when she was eleven. She next starred in Italian horror-director Dario Argento's Phenomena (1985) and in the coming-of-age movie Seven Minutes in Heaven.
Connelly became a star with her next picture, the fantasy Labyrinth (1986), playing Sarah, a teenager who wishes her baby brother into the world of goblins ruled by goblin king Jareth (David Bowie), where she then must journey to retrieve him; the film disappointed at the box office, but became a cult classic in later years with a large fan following still in existence. Connelly starred in several obscure films, such as Etoile (1988) and Some Girls (1988). The Dennis Hopper-directed The Hot Spot (1990) was not a success, critically or commercially; it would be the first of seven movies in which she appeared nude.
Connelly was featured on the cover of Esquire in August 1991, as part of the "Women We Love" feature. She appeared alongside Jason Priestley in the Roy Orbison music video for "I Drove All Night" in 1992.
The big-budget Disney film The Rocketeer (1991) similarly failed to ignite Connelly's career; after its failure, she took some time off from acting. The 1996 independent film Far Harbor played her against type and hinted at a much broader range than she had previously shown. Connelly began to appear in smaller but well-regarded films, such as 1997's Inventing the Abbotts and 2000's Waking the Dead. She played a collegiate lesbian in John Singleton's 1995 ensemble drama, Higher Learning. The critically favored 1998 science fiction film Dark City afforded her the chance to work with such actors as Rufus Sewell, William Hurt, Ian Richardson, and Kiefer Sutherland. Connelly revisited her ingenue image, although in a more understated way, for the 2000 biopic Pollock, in which she played Jackson Pollock's mistress.
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