June 16, 2000
In Sunshine, the family saga by the Hungarian filmmaker Istvan Szabo that opened in New York last Friday, the actresses Jennifer Ehle and Rosemary Harris play the same character at two different stages in her life. Ms. Ehle is the young, rebellious Valerie Sonnenschein, who marries her cousin Ignatz (Ralph Fiennes) in the twilight years of the Austro-Hungarian Empire; Ms. Harris is the mature Valerie, who survives both the death camps of World War II and the Stalinist repression of the 1950's.
It's a smooth transition, made smoother by the fact that Ms. Ehle is Ms. Harris's daughter.
"We've done it twice, actually," Ms. Harris said in the Upper East Side apartment that serves as the family pied-�-terre in Manhattan (home base is North Carolina, where Ms. Harris's husband, the novelist John Ehle, was raised). "The first time was The Camomile Lawn, a lovely British television series that Sir Peter Hall directed," Ms. Harris said.
"He chose Jennifer for the bulk of the story. I think there were seven episodes, and she was in six of them. But the last one jumped to 40 years later when the survivors from World War II met at a funeral, and Jennifer's was one of the surviving characters. And Peter Hall asked me if I would be Jennifer."
"I seem to be riding on her coattails a lot," said Ms. Harris of her daughter, who won a Tony Award this month for her performance in The Real Thing -- thus beating out her mother, who had been nominated for her role in Waiting in the Wings.
Ms. Harris added: "When Ralph and Istvan were talking about casting, apparently, as Jennifer explained it to me the other day, Ralph said, 'Well, I know an actress who would be right for the older Valerie,' and Istvan said, 'Well, I've seen a girl who I think should play the younger Valerie.' And then by chance they put the two pieces together and said, 'Well, isn't that a funny thing -- they're mother and daughter.'
"I said to Jennifer, 'Should we sit down and talk about it?' and she said, 'Oh, no -- do you think we should?' I said, 'No, if we don't know each other pretty well by now, nobody knows us better than we do.' I didn't watch any film clips of her performance. I knew with Sunshine she would be playing from her own personality, so we didn't discuss it too deeply."
One of the great figures of the London and New York stage, whose lengthy r�sum� includes Laurence Olivier's legendary 1963 Uncle Vanya and her own Tony for the original 1966 production of A Lion in Winter, Ms. Harris has been mysteriously neglected by the cinema. "I've never played a really big part in a movie," she said. "I think it would be lovely to go in every day and, like threading beads on a string, to gradually let your part grow, like one does in the theater. But so far, I've not been offered a part that was more than a few scenes."
"I have to say I feel more at home on the stage, partly because of the text -- you get a bigger lump to grab hold of. I jokingly said once I was like an animal that had evolved: I've grown gills for the stage; I breathe in a different way. I am in my element, my own element, when I'm on the stage. I'm in a slightly different element when I'm in a film."