Child Modeling and Early Film Appearances
When Connelly was ten years old, an advertising executive friend of her father suggested she audition as a model. Her parents sent a picture of her to the Ford Modeling Agency, which shortly after added her to its roster. Connelly began modeling for print advertisements before moving on to television commercials. In an interview with The Guardian, she revealed that, after having done a bit of modeling, she had no aspirations to become an actor. She appeared on the cover of several issues of Seventeen in 1986 and 1988. In December 1986, she recorded two pop songs for the Japanese market: "Monologue of Love" and "Message of Love". Connelly sang in phonetic Japanese as she did not speak the language.
Her mother started taking her to acting auditions. At one, Connelly was selected for a supporting role as the aspiring dancer and actress Deborah Gelly in Sergio Leone's 1984 gangster epic Once Upon a Time in America. The role required performing a ballet routine. During the audition, Connelly, who had no ballet training, tried to imitate a ballerina. Her performance, and the similarity of her nose to Elizabeth McGovern's, who played the character as an adult, convinced the director to cast her. Connelly described the movie as "an incredibly idyllic introduction to movie-making". While Once Upon a Time in America was being filmed, Connelly made her first television appearance, in the episode "Stranger in Town" of the British series Tales of the Unexpected.
Her first leading role was in Italian giallo-director Dario Argento's 1985 film Phenomena; she played a girl who uses her psychic powers to communicate with insects, in order to pursue the serial killer of students of the Swiss school where she has just enrolled. She next had the lead in the coming-of-age movie Seven Minutes in Heaven, released the same year.
Of her early career, she said, "Before I knew it, (acting) became what I did. It was a very peculiar way to grow up, combined with my personality." She described feeling like "a kind of walking puppet" through her adolescence, without having time alone to deal with the attention her career was generating.
Read more about this topic: Jennifer Connelly, Life and Career
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