USA Today

New York

Don’t mess with Jennifer Connelly, or you’ll have to deal with her protective husband, actor Paul Bettany. “Be nice to her. She’s fragile!” warns Bettany as his wife sits down for an afternoon chat in the Regency Hotel, and he leaves to tend to their five-month-old son, Stellan. Bettany needn’t worry, since it would be exceedingly difficult to be nasty to his wife of one year. Connelly, who specialises in playing tortured, haunted souls in such dark dramas as Requiem for a Dream and now House of Sand and Fog, is sweetly, quietly funny, if aloof. “I’m very blessed,” smiles Connelly, 33. “Gorgeous, healthy, funny kids. A good husband.”

This Connelly, the delicately gorgeous earth mother who takes a break from press duties to breast feed her baby and joke that “it’s feeding time,” is worlds apart from House’s Kathy Nicolo, a homeless, destitute recovering alcoholic. Kathy is fighting a losing battle to win back the childhood home she lost to Iranian immigrant Massoud Amir Behrani (Ben Kingsley) in a tax mix-up. And this Kathy will stop at nearly nothing to get that dinky little house back. It’s exactly the kind of thorny, tricky role that appeals to Connelly, who won a best-supporting actress Oscar for playing a long-suffering wife in 2001’s A Beautiful Mind.

“I don’t read that many scripts that I like that much and respond to passionately,” she says. In a sense, House returns Connelly to her roots. After starring in this year’s underperforming action flick The Hulk, she is back doing the kind of intimate movies that bring out the best in her. She gravitated toward the despondent Kathy because “she is desperate at the beginning and has nothing to tether her grief. I like the fact that the characters were broad, and they weren’t your typical heroes. The movie didn’t pick a winner.”

Connelly is perhaps one of the few A-listers who rarely shies away from playing abject losers on the big screen. Who could forget her spiraling addict in Requiem, a heavy film that graphically ended with her selling her body to score drugs? That’s why Connelly would love to finally do a comedy, although she jokes, “I don’t think I’m high on anyone’s list for casting!” But to hear her colleagues tell it, she never lets all that drama mess with her head. Mention Connelly’s name to Keith Gordon, who directed her in 2000’s Waking the Dead, and he positively swoons. While shooting their film, Connelly was nursing her now-six-year-old son Kai, from a relationship with photographer David Dugan, and Gordon noticed that she looked rather wan. Turns out that Connelly, a vegetarian, wasn’t eating the meat-laden craft-services meals.

When Gordon told her to request special lunches and dinners, she said, “They have to cook for so many people, and I can’t make their job harder.” Gordon is still stunned by that lack of attitude. “She’s that kind of nice,” he raves. “She is the only woman other than my wife that I’d want to run off with. She’s very playful and kind. She has no ego.” Not even after winning that Academy Award. The golden statuette hasn’t drastically altered her life or turned her into a marquee superstar. Neither has she been struck by the post-Oscar curse, when careers can go downhill fast. “Certainly, I have more work opportunities, more scripts to read, which is fantastic,” she says.

Much of the time, she’s a frazzled mom trying to coordinate busy schedules. But when it comes to acting, she still loves it after being in the business for two decades, since 1984’s Once Upon a Time in America. “I’m really happy in what I do. I think I’ve got a pretty good job. A lot of the personal life has stayed the same.” In fact, it hasn’t at all. Connelly finished House shortly before last Christmas. That’s when she and Bettany, who met while co-starring in A Beautiful Mind but didn’t start dating until after they ended their respective relationships, “went away to Scotland, I think the next day, and that’s where we got married. We had a great time.”

Connelly, so ‘notoriously indecisive’ that she had an unfurnished country house upstate for more than a year before selling it, said there was no question in her mind that Bettany, 32, was the one. “I knew very quickly with Paul. We decided to get married very early on. We had known each other for a while. But it was pretty soon after we started dating that we decided to get married. I have a lot of respect for him. I find him remarkable.” Now, the family shares a home in Brooklyn with baby Stellan, who was born in London, and Kai. Stellan, says his mother, is a smiling, roly-poly and playful baby. Bettany, too, is over the moon about parenthood. “I do nappy (diaper) changes,” the British co-star of Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World says. “I’ve found fatherhood surprisingly easy. It can be sleepless and tiring, and the one bad thing is that you’re slightly irritable because you haven’t had much rest. But apart from that, it’s beautiful.” As for his wife, “she’s always been a mommy for as long as I’ve known her. It’s just amazing to watch her in that role.” He also gets to take on that role since the pair do their best to never work at the same time “unless it’s something so irresistible that you just have to do it,” she says. “But we’re going to try our hardest to alternate.”

Next, she starts shooting the thriller Dark Water in Toronto. “It’s a lot to balance, but you make it happen,” she says.