Jennifer Connelly: I wish I’d laughed more and not been such a nerd

FORMER child star Jennifer Connelly won an Oscar for playing Alicia Nash in A Beautiful Mind and has starred in hit films such as Blood Diamond and He’s Just Not That Into You.

Jennifer, 42, is married to British actor Paul Bettany and they have three children. She is an ambassador for both Human Rights Education and Save The Children.

Her new romcom Stuck In Love is released on June 14. She talked to GARTH PEARCE about what she wishes she’d known at 18.

“I WISH I had not been a complete nerd. I had no sense of humour and took myself so seriously.

I was really interested in school and keen to prove to myself that I was not just a sexual object at 18.

So I concentrated on being a good student and got good grades. I was not concerned with a social life. I would stay in the library studying. How geeky is that?

I started working when I was ten (cast in the film Once Upon A Time In America) and acted or modelled from that time.

I also starred with David Bowie in the film Labyrinth when I was 15. I think I’m terrible in it, now I look back, but I was a kid. I became too aware of
how I looked, too, which is not to be recommended for someone so young.

Going from child actress to adult acting is also an odd experience. It’s as if you have to do grown-up, more sexual parts to prove yourself. I had got into
Yale (one of America’s top universities) and one of my professors said that he had seen a poster of me at a cinema.

It was of me on a rocking horse, wearing a tank top. (From the 1991 film Career Opportunities).

I thought: “I don’t want to be that girl any more.” I felt that, at 18, I’d had so many experiences of life through that early career.

I felt older in some ways — yet still remarkably young and inexperienced.

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I thought acting was simply about turning up on time, learning my lines, not keeping anyone waiting and making everyone happy.

I did not have any thoughts of my own — I did not think I was part of the creative process. I was a pacifier, just wanting to keep the peace. So I got
myself into a corner by my late teens — I had a love-hate relationship with acting.

Becoming happier in our own skin is key.

It happens at different times to different women. For me, it was after having my son Kai when I was 26.

I never married his dad (photographer David Dugan).

We were living together and his dad moved out. I stayed in the home.

My figure changed, despite not going on a diet or work-out schedule, and I lost weight. But I got happier.

It was the right thing for me to be a mother.

I met my husband Paul on the set of A Beautiful Mind. We were both in other relationships at the time and didn’t even spend much time together until the end of the film. So it was not love at first sight. There was a moment
hanging around together when I thought: “Mmmm”. I noticed him in a way that I had not noticed him at the beginning.

I do not believe that you leave one relationship for another. I have always thought that — it has nothing to do with age, but just opinion and belief.

So we talked only in a guarded way and went back to our separate lives.

When we met up six months later in London at an awards dinner, neither of us was in a relationship. It was completely different.

I am not going to say how he proposed — it’s too personal. But we did marry quite quickly. He is a lovely guy and has been so good for all of us as a
family.

Kai (now 16) has a sense of humour that he did not have before and his jokes are delivered in an English accent.

I have enjoyed being a mother (she and Paul have son Stellan, aged nine, and 23 month-old daughter Agnes) and am happy at home.

But when the right script comes along — such as Stuck In Love, which had warmth and humour — you think: “I want to be back doing something like this.”

We agreed, long ago, not to both work at the same time so there is always one of us there with the family.

There is something that does not go away in acting, it seems, whether you are 18 or 80 — that feeling of thinking: “I hope I am good in this”.

And, although I am no longer a nerd, I am not one of those people who thinks it is cool to show up late or be unruly or awkward.”