Jennifer Ehle got to marry Colin Firth in Pride and Prejudice, failed to keep Stephen Fry on the straight and narrow in Wilde, and jumped into bed with everyone in The Camomile Lawn. Now she has a starring role in Tom Stoppard's The Real Thing. Anthony Quinn meets a current favourite. from Harpers & Queen, July 1999
If reputation is any guide, Jennifer Ehle would sooner subject herself to a dose of root-canal work in the dentist's chair than endure the prying formalities of an interview. But reputation here plays false. It helps that we have met before, and her greeting outside the rehearsal rooms of the Old Vic is characteristically warm and personable. Indeed, once we are sitting in a caf� around the corner, the only moment of real awkwardness occurs right at the beginning when, having seen her friend Cate Blanchett in David Hare's Plenty the previous night, I happen to mention two rather scathing reviews of her performance. Jennifer looks stricken, and her eyes begin to well with tears. Oh dear. 'Can we change the subject?' she says quietly. Fine, fine, I reply. So much for professional rivalry.
Right now, she is starring in a Donmar Warehouse production of Tom Stoppard's The Real Thing, a droll, intricately layered study of art, love, and the love of art. Jennifer, who plays Annie, the youngest in the play's romantic quadrille, has never done Stoppard before, though she knows the play of old. 'I first saw it in New York when I was thirteen or fourteen, with Jeremy Irons and Glenn Close in the leads. I remember loving it at the time. It's very different from anything I've ever done before - there's a lot more asked of you.'
She is undoubtely equal to the task. Allied to her physical poise and allure is a thoughtful articulacy that is well-suited to Stoppard's intellectual game-playing, and her fine eyes seem to be forever amused.
Allied to her physical poise and allure is a thoughtful articulacy
well-suited to Tom Stoppard's intellectual game-playing
In her voice, an occasional twang betrays North Carolina origins. Her mother is the English actress Rosemary Harris, her father the American writer John Ehle. She spent much of her childhood roaming the States, and changed schools eighteen times. 'We went wherever my mother was working. We were fairly portable, I think: one child, a father, and a typewriter.' Consequently, the young Jennifer's career seemed written in the stars and the DNA, though she says it never so clear-cut. 'I did spend most of the time behind the scenes, in a dressing room. It was the most exciting place to be. I didn't think I wanted to act, though. I could have rebelled and become a doctor, but I didn't have the brains...or the guts.'
She eventually rejected the Juillard in New York for the Central School of Speech and Drama in London - 'It's still the best place for a classical training.' Strange to think that an actress considered the very epitome of the English rose had to train herself out of an American accent. 'The summer between my second and third year, I spent twenty minutes each day reading aloud to myself in an English accent. It was like being in a body-cast to start off - I couldn't really express myself spontaneously at all.'
This did not stop her landing the plum part of the nymphomaniac Calypso in Peter Hall's television adaptation of The Camomile Lawn, a role that first brought her to the critic's attention. Calypso's sexual shenanigans led one to dub the series 'The Camomile Porn', though Jennifer feels it was great character role, still a rare commodity for young actresses. 'With a male lead, it seems that the more beautiful the woman he loves, the more the man is made interesting and charismatic in the audience's eyes. A heroine in the same position is enhanced in the audience's eyes by how interesting and intelligent the man she loves is. When I saw the film Elizabeth, I thought that, for once, Joseph Fiennes was put in the position that is normally reserved for the woman - he didn't get a chance to show anything more than his own beauty and his love for the queen.'
That said, Jennifer's most famous role to date - Elizabeth Bennet in the BBC's 1995 Pride and Prejudice, for which she won a Bafta award - encompassed as much wit, passion, and complexity as a single heroine could possibly carry. Nothing in Jennifer's film career so far has showcased her talent in quite the same way, though at 28 she has time enough to put that right. 'I wanted to be Elizabeth from the moment I read the book as a girl,' she recalls. The beaming grace of her performance was occasionally overshadowed by reports of her involvement with Colin Firth, her Mr Darcy - a gift to the gossip columns. 'It was strange,' she says, 'because at the time I was working for the RSC in Stratford and I was not really aware of how much fuss the serial was making.' Unlike those actresses who complain that roles in successful costume dramas have led them to be typecast, she feels nothing but gratitude for her good fortune: 'When people ask me if I'm tired of costume drama and bonnets, I find it extraordinary. If every character I was asked to play was as fascinating as Elizabeth Bennet, I'd staple a bonnet on my scalp.'