Jennifer Connelly

Name: Jennifer Connelly
Born: 12 December 1970 (Age: 40)
Where: Woodstock, New York, USA
Height: 5' 8"
Awards: Won 1 Oscar, 1 BAFTA, 1 Golden Globe.

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 russel 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 Connelly is this year's Chloe Sevigny or  hilary swanka couple of cool indie movies and BANG! But this is far, far from the truth. For Jennifer 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.

She 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. Her 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 was four, they moved to Brooklyn Heights, just across the Brooklyn Bridge from Manhattan, Jennifer completing her primary and secondary education at St Ann's school.

Her education widened quickly. An advertising executive friend of the family suggested that 10-year-old Jennifer, 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 little Jennifer into the city to auditions. She was very successful, appearing in many newspaper and magazine ads, and in TV commercials. These days, Jennifer claims she can remember very little about this, in fact recalling only one ad - for Scott's toilet paper.

Jennifer's work took her all over, particularly to Europe and, while in England, she made her onscreen debut as a member of an underground child cult in the video for Duran Duran's Union Of The Snake. She also won a part in one episode of the hit series, Tales Of The Unexpected, spooky adaptations of Roald Dahl stories.

About a year earlier, she'd also been suggested for another, far bigger project. Sergio Leone, director of eastwood 's early spaghetti Westerns, was putting together an epic spanning the career of a gang of Jewish hoodlums in New York City.