Rise to Fame
Starting as a catalog model at 10 isn't unusual. Recording phonetic Japanese pop songs at the same age, without knowing the language, is. Connelly did both before anyone knew her name. Early film roles in Labyrinth and The Rocketeer kept her employed but not exactly busy. Requiem for a Dream (2000) changed the equation. She played a woman unraveling in slow motion, and the industry noticed she could do more than look good in period costumes. A Beautiful Mind locked it in the following year, earning her the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress and, as a bonus, a husband.
In the Spotlight
Two decades past her Oscar, she's busier than she was in her thirties. Top Gun: Maverick (2022) was the biggest film of her career by box office. Snowpiercer gave her four seasons on television. Dark Matter landed on Apple TV+ in 2024. The range across these projects, sci-fi, blockbuster action, prestige drama, suggests someone who stopped waiting to be cast as the serious actress and started taking whatever interested her. That's either a strategy or a luxury. Probably both.
Side Notes
The Yale-to-Stanford academic detour is a footnote compared to the marriage story. She'd described herself as cautious about commitment, and then 9/11 happened. Paul Bettany, who she'd met on the set of A Beautiful Mind, spent two days trying to reach her after the attacks. When he finally did, he reportedly said he was coming over and they should get married. She took him up on it. They wed in Scotland on January 1, 2003. The phonetic Japanese pop songs she recorded as a child model aren't on streaming anywhere, which is probably for the best.