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Princess Lucilla
Background:
"I'm definitely more attracted to chaos than to order. The point is, I find the
female roles out there very cliché. If we are limited to being only lovers or
mothers, we are limiting ourselves." Connie Nielsen
Danish actress Connie Nielsen is widely recognized for her Screen Actors
Guild-nominated role of Princess Lucilla, the long-lost love of Russell Crowe's
Maximus, in the Academy Award-winning Gladiator (2000). First noticed while
playing Satan’s daughter in The Devil's Advocate (1997), Nielsen later gained
more attention with her roles in Soldier (1998), One Hour Photo (2002), The
Hunted (2003), Basic (2003) and The Ice Harvest (2005).
Connie will soon be seen in the 2006 films The Situation, Tonight at Noon, and
Hallam Foe. More privately, the 5' 10” tall Danish beauty is currently dating
Lars Ulrich, the drummer of Metallica.
Connie Inge-Lise
Childhood and Family:
On July 3, 1965, Connie Inge-Lise was born in Elling, Jutland, Denmark, but
raised in Copenhagen. The daughter of an actress-writer mother, Connie has one
older brother, Ulrich Nielsen (born in 1969). A trained singer and dancer,
Connie is also fluent in six languages: English, German, Danish, Swedish, French
and Italian. Her hobby is collecting sunglasses and reportedly she has around
200 pairs. Connie currently resides in New York with her son Sebastian (born on
June 2, 1990).
Gladiator Lady
Career:
"If I start thinking about it that way, I'll get scared. I'll start not feeling
free about what I'm doing. And I wouldn't want that." Connie Nielsen
Encouraged by her actress-writer mother to pursue an acting career, Connie
Nielsen made her stage-acting debut at age 15, performing in a cabaret penned by
her mother. The following three years, she went to Paris to further her acting
career. Fluent in six languages, Connie later worked and studied in Rome, Milan,
South Africa and New York. She also stayed in Italy for a while and appeared in
the Italian film Vacanze di Natale '91 (a.k.a. Christmas Vacation '91, 1992) and
the made-for-TV French flick, Le Paradis Absolument (1993). Connie later knocked
on America’s door with her first breakthrough appearance in the American
made-for-cable movie, the thriller Voyage (a.k.a. Cruise of Fear, 1993, USA
Network), playing a terrorized passenger, alongside Eric Roberts, Rutger Hauer
and Karen Allen.
“It was so terrible that it came as a relief to one reviewer that there was
something nice to say about it. So I actually got a positive mention in
Variety." Connie Nielsen (on the movie Voyage (1993)
In 1994, she auditioned for Lawrence Kasdan for a role in French Kiss, but
Kasdan did not cast her. He suggested Connie move to the USA instead. After
struggling in the USA for three years, Connie made her breakthrough film role as
Satan's seductive, redheaded daughter in the supernatural The Devil's Advocate
(1997, opposite Al Pacino and Keanu Reeves). She followed it up with a
costarring role as the mother of a mute son in Soldier (along with Kurt Russell)
and an appearance as a sexy German woman, who falls for a drug-addicted
screenwriter (played by Ben Stiller), in Permanent Midnight (both in 1998, also
with Elizabeth Hurley). Connie also had a small part as the beautiful mother of
Mason Gamble’s character in Wes Anderson's quirky comedy Rushmore (1998,
alongside Bill Murray) and teamed with Mia Kershner, playing two disturbed
sisters, in the low profile thriller Dark Summer (1999, a.k.a. The Innocents,
also with Jean-Hugues Anglade).
The new millennium brought Connie fame, thanks to the portrayal of Princess
Lucilla, Marcus Aurelius’ daughter and the sister of a tyrannical emperor
(played by Joaquin Phoenix) who falls in love with Maximus (played by Russell
Crowe), in director Ridley Scott’s Oscar-winning epic Gladiator (2000, also with
the late Richard Harris). Her divergent role received praise, earned her a
Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by the Cast of a
Theatrical Motion Picture and won her an Empire Award for Best Actress. Being
asked about the award-winning film, Connie explained, "The script completely
gripped me. There are colossal elements, like the setting and the battles, and
yet the story is very intimate in how it brings you into the personal
relationships between people, especially in the case of Lucilla. She is caught
between the ambitions of her brother and the will of Maximus, with whom she has
a past."
Following the Screen Actors Guild nomination, Connie nabbed roles as the lone
female member in Brian De Palma’s outer-space saga Mission to Mars (2000, with
Gary Sinise, Kim Delaney, Don Cheadle and Tim Robbins) and as a wife and mother
who becomes the target of a stalker (played by Robin Williams) in the
Sundance-screened feature thriller One Hour Photo (2002). She also starred as an
industrial spy in a corporate war in Olivier Assayas’ highly praised suspense
thriller Demonlover (2002, with Chloë Sevigny and Gina Gershon). Later that
year, she acted opposite John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson in John McTiernan's
Basic and won the female lead as an FBI agent in William Friedkin's action crime
feature The Hunted (also with Oscar-winning actors Tommy Lee Jones and Benicio
Del Toro, both in 2003).
"I trained with the FBI in Portland and I also had many conversations with
female FBI agents in Los Angeles, as well. That was again something that also
came in very handy for Basic (2003), because I'd learned already how to handle a
gun and how to behave just physically when you're in a situation, a threat. That
was very good to know. I didn't have to do that again." Connie Nielsen (on films
Basic and The Hunted, both in 2003)
Recent years saw Connie costar opposite Aidann Quinn in Bille August’s Return to
Sender (premiered at The Toronto Film Festival in 2004) and with Benjamin Bratt
in John Dahl’s The Great Raid (also with Joseph Fiennes and James Franco, 2004),
a true-story based film about the liberation of 500 POWs during WWII. She
portrayed a strip club owner, who escapes with a gangster accountant (played by
John Cusack), in Harold Ramis’ Christmas crime flick Ice Harvest (2005, also
with Billy Bob Thornton and Randy Quaid) and starred as a woman torn between two
brothers in the Danish drama Brødre (a.k.a. Brothers, 2005), the latter of which
won her Best Actress Awards from the Danish Academy Awards and from the San
Sebastian Film Festival.
Connie is currently on set completing her upcoming films. She is costarring in
Philip Haas' drama, about a love triangle between a CIA operative, an American
journalist and an Iraqi photographer, titled The Situation, Michael Almereyda's
Tonight at Noon, and David Mackenzie's adaptation of Peter Jinks' novel, Hallam
Foe (starring Jamie Bell).
“Often, when you get a really good script and you receive the new pages, you see
that the entire thing has been dumbed down. Films in the 30s and 40s that were
huge blockbusters were very sophisticated in their language and the ideas they
brought. There were no questions about whether the audience would get it or not.
Today, there is a certain fear, or horror, that the audience won't understand.
They underestimate the audience very often. And that is because, when you look
at the box-office to see that total brain-dead films make lots of money, then
that's what the cash machine is telling you to do. In other words, ‘more
brain-dead, more money!’” Connie Nielsen
Awards:
