‘I get a little stir-crazy’: Jennifer Connelly on David Bowie, working with family and going back to college

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.

Photograph: Everett Collection Inc/AlamyBorn in the Catskill mountains in New York, Connelly became a model at the age of 10, and made her movie debut at 14 in Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America.

Photograph: AJ Pics/AlamyBrooklyn was also where Connelly spent much of her childhood, attending the private Saint Ann’s School in Brooklyn Heights, until her fledgling career began to take off.

For a whole generation of late Gen X-ers, Connelly is best known for playing Sarah in the Goblin underworld of Jim Henson’s Labyrinth, a movie that has only grown in cult status since its release.

Rigorous about preparation, Connelly approaches her roles with the obsessive diligence of a school swot, dissecting her scripts until she is confident she can fully inhabit her characters.