Like mother, like daughter? Jennifer Ehle, left, and her mother, Rosemary Harris, have both been nominated for their leading performances in dramas. Ehle is in The Real Thing, while Harris starred in Waiting in the Wings. photo by Ari Mintz
Rosemary Harris and daughter Jennifer Ehle vie for a best actress award
Like mother, like daughter?
Jennifer Ehle, left, and her mother, Rosemary Harris, have
both been nominated for their leading performances in
dramas. Ehle is in The Real Thing,
while Harris starred in Waiting in the Wings. photo by
Ari Mintz
Statisticians in the business of knowing such things promise it's a first: mother and daughter competing against each other for a Tony Award. Jennifer Ehle, the offspring in the pair, quotes "Mum" -- that would be Rosemary Harris -- "'Darling, we both get to go to the ball.'" And the ceremony that proceeds it.
It is the promising 30-year-old Ehle's first nomination, for Tom Stoppard's The Real Thing. Asked when she decided to become an actress, she laughs and replies, "I don't think I've made that decision. It's sort of just happened." Her mother recalls her teenage daughter's announcing one day that she wanted to become an actress, "because you have so much fun."
It is the ninth nomination for the popular veteran Harris, 69, this time for Waiting in the Wings, which recently closed after a six-month run. Having made her Broadway debut in 1952 (in Climate of Eden), she says, "This is the only time I can genuinely say it's as nice to be nominated as to win" -- which she also has done, for The Lion in Winter in 1967.
But a first for the Tonys isn't a first for the actresses -- both were nominated for a Best Actress Genie Award, Canada's equivalent of the Oscar, for Sunshine. In Istvan Szabo's latest and somewhat autobiographical film opening in New York Friday, they play youthful and mature versions of Valerie, the wife of Ralph Fiennes.
Just to compound the coincidences, in both plays, these actresses -- who are competing in the category of Best Performance by a Leading Actress in a Play -- play actresses. Harris played May Davenport, grand dame of Waiting in the Wings in the American premiere of Noel Coward's comedy about a home for retired actresses.
In the revival of Stoppard's play about relationships (which she first did in London) Ehle is Annie, a headstrong and passionate woman who falls in love with a playwright. One of the attractions of the role for her, she says, was the similarity to her parents' occupations; her father is John Ehle, the screenwriter and novelist.
Such is the nature of their profession that although mother and daughter are appearing in theaters two blocks apart, the actresses haven't seen much of each other since arriving on Broadway. Ehle caught a performance of Waiting in the Wings before previews began for The Real Thing, which Harris has yet to see. The other day, dashing to a matinee, Harris felt an arm around her shoulder and heard her daughter's voice say, "At last I feel we're in this town together."
They recently spent an entire day together -- or at least near each other -- as they did back-to-back interviews at the Regency Hotel to promote the release of Sunshine.
Just back from lunch together at what Ehle described as "the poshest Japanese restaurant I've ever been to," she, in a black pantsuit and with no artificial enhancements save crimson toenail polish and, possibly, the strawberry tint to her shaggy hair, held forth in one hotel suite. Harris, a black-and-white motif for both hair and clothing (she wears her hair upswept under a bow), was in another. The things one has to do for one's art can include relinquishing the single day off a week from the theater.
Both speak in veddy-British accents onstage, in the movie and in person, but Ehle was born in North Carolina, which Harris describes as "base camp -- where we have our books" when she hasn't been traipsing off to play a role. "Mine adapts to wherever I am," Ehle says in explaining her accent. "I changed schools about 18 times as a kid, so I did everything to infiltrate."
Harris, born in England and raised in India, where her father was a British military officer, has spent a big chunk of her adult life in the United States, along the way becoming "completely homogenized," as she puts it. It was here she met both of her husbands. With the first, Ellis Rabb, the actor and director, she was in a repertory company in New York in the early '60s. She describes her marriage to Ehle as "matchmade" -- a friend set them up.
The actresses previously played across the generations in the 1992 British television drama The Chamomile Lawn, and about both film roles, Harris says, "I got them entirely because of Jennifer. Now when anyone mentions Chamomile, they don't even remember I'm in it."
Ehle has a slightly different version for the casting of Sunshine: "At the same time that Istvan was thinking about me for Valerie, he asked Ralph who should be the older Valerie. and he's alleged to have said, 'What about Rosemary Harris?' And they hadn't known we were mother and daughter."
"Sometimes I wonder if I have any personality whatsoever," says Ehle after plaintively replying "I don't know" to any number of questions about her past, present and future, including where she considers home. She has a flat in London, but the real answer is up for grabs, possibly having something to do with the "I don't want to talk about that" reply she makes to a question about romantic entanglements. She is no longer with Colin Firth, with whom she costarred in the 1996 television mini-series Pride and Prejudice, which aired on A&E.
"I wouldn't want it to overpower the rest of my life," she says. "I don't want to worry about getting older, and I probably would if I became well-known. That's why I've avoided trying to work in America. There seems to be more beauty fascism here than in England."
Harris, who'd studied to be a nurse "because I really thought I was too modest to be an actress," also has an opinion about the face value of acting.
"When I first came to Broadway I was offered film contracts," says this actress, who's chosen to spend the bulk of her career working in the theater. This was around the time that Audrey Hepburn's career was taking off, and, she says, "I just had the feeling, enough sense to know that wouldn't happen to me. I didn't have the looks for it. And I didn't want to spend my time by the swimming pool twiddling my thumbs." Her modesty is showing.