PROFILE: JENNIFER CONNELLY

"It’s been a while since we checked in with Connelly, last seen laboring through a series of rom-comish dramas  — He’s Just Not that Into You, Stuck on You, The Dilemma — wearing the expression of Antigone making conversation at a tupperware party. She took a couple of years off from acting to have her daughter, Agnes, but returned to screens last year in Darren Aronofsky’s Noah, playing Noah’s wife Nameeh, fighting for her children’s life as the heavens opened... This month sees the release of Aloft, Connelly’s film with Llosa, a mix of mystical allegory, handheld cinematography and subzero temperatures, in which Connelly plays a mother of two sons on the periphery of the Arctic circle who is drawn into the company of faith healers after tragedy strikes at the heart of her family. Put it together with Noah and Shelter, her forthcoming drama about homelessness in which she was directed by husband Paul Bettany, and you have a trio of films pitting Connelly against the elements, scratching out an existence beneath glowering skies. No question: she is in survival mode.   At 44, her beauty has shed whatever air of sultriness it had in her twnties and bedded down into something altogether more purified, striated, fierce. In Aloft those green eyes seem to contain their own arctic storms." — from my profile for Town and Country magazine