On a recent morning, Jennifer Connelly stood before the mirror in the bathroom of her West Village apartment and found her first gray hair. This may come as a shock to anyone who remembers Connelly's stint as an Eighties teen queen -- or, further back, as the 12-year-old who melted boys' hearts from behind a chink in the wall in Sergio Leone's 1984 epic, Once Upon a Time in America.

     If you did grow up in the Eighties, then chances are you saw Connelly play the pubescent babysitter in Jim Henson's Labyrinth and then the rebellious rich girl -- with blown-out hair, Brooke Shields eyebrows and a Dynasty-sized coat over leggings -- in John Hughes' Career Opportunities. There was even a cameo in a Duran Duran video and the release of a pop song -- in Japanese.

     Connelly laughs looking back on the fleeting moment when she was a male teenager's ultimate fantasy object -- the face that launched a thousand dirt bikes. "Thinking about the old stuff is like having a conversation with someone you were once in a relationship with," she says later that day, sitting down to a pot of tea at a neighborhood restaurant. "You remember how there was once this incredible intimacy between you, but now you feel like strangers."

     With three high-profile films scheduled for release this year, Connelly is about to show that she's come a long way since 1986. First up is Keith Gordon's Waking the Dead, in which she stars as a bright-eyed Seventies activist whose mysterious death starts to haunt her lover (Billy Crudup) 10 years later -- so much so that he begins to suspect she may still be alive. Next come Darren Aronofsky's Requiem for a Dream, costarring Jared Leto, and Ed Harris' Pollock, about the life of the Abstract Expressionist.

     Gordon has said, with just a touch of Hollywood overstatement, that casting Connelly's part in Waking the Dead was akin to the search for a Scarlett O'Hara for Gone with the Wind. "But Jennifer just had this tremendous intelligence," he explains. And while most of the actresses who read for the part struck Gordon as clueless, Connelly engaged him on subjects ranging from Isabelle Allende and magical realism to quantum physics and Schrödinger's cat.

     "It didn't hurt that I knew Billy thought highly of her," he adds. "I had called him and he said, 'I don't think people even realize how good she is yet."

     Then there's the obvious chemistry between Connelly and Crudub, already recorded in 1996's Inventing the Abbotts. Shooting the love scenes in Waking the Dead, Connelly had to take frequent time-outs to unpeel Crudup's hippie-style muttonchops every time they ended up stuck to her forehead. But there's nothing goofy about the final cut, which is fraught with a kind of ominous passion.

     As for Connelly's offscreen romantic life, she spent five years with Bill Campbell, her co-star in 1991's The Rocketeer, and recently ended a relationship with Dave Dougan, a photographer and the father of her two-year-old son. "I have something so new I'm not sure I should even talk about it," she says. "But it's hot. My God, I have such a one-track mind these days! I run around making lists of all the things I need to do in our next sexual encounter."

     All this bedroom talk comes as a surprise, since Connelly insists that it's the nerd, not the nymph, with whom she identifies. "It's so strange to start working as a child," says the actress, who began modeling at 10 and had appeared in nine films by the time she was 20. "I was being so much watched from the outside that I became very careful -- which is sort of crippling. In certain ways you grow up fast, but I think in other ways you arrest."

     After the string of teen flicks, Connelly decided to take a break and enrolled at Yale. But when her "lack of socialization skills" go the best of her, Connelly left -- first for Standford, then to work on another string of films she'd rather not think about (Far Harbor, Mulholland Falls, etc.).

     Now 29, Connelly picks her roles carefully, but she's just as happy thinking about the outer-space mural she's planning for her son Kai's bedroom. After nearly 20 years on the outer rim of the limelight, Connelly is far too familiar with the fallibility of the acting life to submit to the fantasies Hollywood spins for its leading ladies. "Let's just avoid the word 'celebrity,'" she says. But despite her insistence that acting is a job like any other, you can sense her enchantment when she talks about how her dream role relates to her dream man.

     "When I think about the guy I'm looking for these days, it's somebody who's completely uninhibited, who defies all conventions," she says. "The guy who's just so real, so amazingly clear. You know that guy? I want to play that girl."

ROBERT HASKELL