Jennifer Connelly’s cruelly ironic early career crossroads: “I didn’t find it deeply fulfilling”
If you grew up in the 21st century, then you probably know Jennifer Connelly from a number of major blockbusters and celebrated dramas.
She played Tom Cruise’s love interest in the smash hit Top Gun: Maverick, adding a new, more grounded dimension to the high-octane ‘Best Picture’ nominee. She was recognised by a number of major bodies for her role in Requiem for a Dream and bagged a ‘Best Supporting Actress’ Oscar for A Beautiful Mind. However, if you’re a child of the end of the 20th century, then you know her for very different reasons.
Connelly first rose to prominence as a child actor in the 1980s. She made her movie debut in Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America, playing a younger version of Elizabeth McGovern’s character. Her biggest and best role from this era has to be Sarah Williams from Labyrinth. As the young hero of Jim Hanson’s enduring fantasy adventure, Connelly was our guide through a world of magic, puppets, and David Bowie’s distracting crotch. For this character alone, she will live on in movie history forever.
She may have made plenty of amazing memories during her youth, but being a child actor is incredibly taxing. As Connelly herself would discover, it’s hard to know what sort of effect early fame will have on someone when they get older.
Despite finding success on film, the star harboured a desire to go to university and study English Literature. She was accepted into the prestigious Yale University in 1988 and was looking forward to keeping her head down and taking her studies seriously. Unfortunately, she was already a major screen presence at this point, and people started to recognise her. This wasn’t just limited to her fellow students; the Yale faculty was also very aware of who they had on their books.
Speaking to The Times, Connelly revealed one particularly embarrassing moment from her college days. One of her professors approached her and said that they had seen her on a poster for the film Career Opportunities. This John Hughes-produced comedy saw Connelly playing a lonely rich girl who grows close to a janitor at a Target department store. The poster that her professor had seen depicted the student riding on a plastic rocking horse—not the image you want someone in charge of your future to see.
“There was a period where I didn’t know if I wanted to continue working,” Connelly said, reflecting on this time of her life. “I didn’t find it deeply fulfilling. Then there was a very conscious process of experimenting with what would happen if I tried to make it my own thing, untangled it from something that I did for other people.”
Shortly after this incident, Connolly would transfer to Stanford to study drama. “For me, it was literally about going to work by myself,” she said of this move, adding, “taking responsibility for it creatively, feeling like I wanted to find things that really spoke to me.”
This turned out to be the right move, as she decided to commit to acting full-time and the rest, as they say, is history. Strange to think that a screen icon was almost completely derailed by a picture of her on a toy horse, but stranger things have happened in the world of movies.
