Jennifer Connelly

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

Jennifer Connelly describes the woman she plays in A Beautiful Mind--Alicia, the wife of the brilliant, mad mathematician John Nash--as "forthright, gutsy, irreverent, a bit of a black sheep." Those qualities are certainly present in Connelly's luminous performance, but perhaps out of modesty, the actress doesn't mention her own shining, salient characteristic, which is intelligence of a particularly watchful kind.

It is a quality that has marked her career--even in something like 2000's Requiem for a Dream, in which she played a junkie allowing herself to be sexually degraded for a fix. Since Connelly, now 31, has been in movies since she was 11 and has taken time out to study at Stanford and Yale, she is well prepared for a wide range of roles. "Since I grew up in it," she says, "I'm comfortable with all sides of the business." That perhaps accounts for the untroubled ease with which she inhabits a range that has included a political activist in Waking the Dead and the girlfriend who survived Pollock's fatal car crash. "Jennifer is a great listener," says Mind director Ron Howard, "both onscreen and off." That capacity girds her work with a passion as fierce as it is unspoken.

--By Richard Schickel. Reported by Benjamin Nugent

With reporting by Benjamin Nugent