By Andrew Anthony
from the Guardian/Observer
Sunday May 23, 1999
When it comes to building up her public profile, you couldn't accuse Jennifer Ehle of attention seeking, still less ruthless ambition. 'I usually duck behind the Portaloo when the publicist is coming,' she says. It's a typical Ehle comment: smart, self-deprecating, unstarry. In her own mind, she's not famous, and she's clearly thrown by the idea that anyone should think otherwise.
In a way, she's right, too, insofar as she is not a 'celebrity'. There's nothing of the film premiere queen about her and, while she is unavoidably beautiful, she doesn't trade in obvious glamour. Yet for a few giddy weeks back in 1995 it seemed like the whole nation was gripped by her portrayal of Elizabeth Bennet in the BBC's Pride and Prejudice. With that level of recognition, many actresses would have been tempted to cash in by revealing themselves all over the place, from the cut of their designer dresses to the psycho-comfort of Anthony Clare's chair. Instead, Ehle gave one 10-minute interview to the Radio Times and went off to the Royal Shakespeare Company for a year. She says she didn't read the newspapers for nine months, roughly the period during which speculation about her brief relationship with her Pride and Prejudice co-star, Colin Firth, was at its most frenzied. 'It all became a bit of a monster,' she says without drama.
Now, tentatively, she's coming to terms with the fact that, as she puts it, 'you have to make a bit of noise'. So I'm the latest of a line of hacks to troop up the stairs of the Old Vic to the room where Ehle is rehearsing for a new production of Tom Stoppard's The Real Thing.
She is 15 minutes late, and I'm left pacing around like some sad Stage Door Johnny, but just as I'm working myself up into a flounce, she appears with a smile that is worth twice the wait. She's dressed in shapely black and displays an easy physical confidence that one would be hard pressed not to describe as sexy. I'd read that she is shy but I think it's more an unwillingness to project an image. She hasn't developed a heightened interview persona. She is, in the nicest sense, just herself.
Her role as Annie, an actress who has an affair with her co-star, will inevitably invite comment on the fact that Ehle has been involved with Firth and, before that, her co-star in The Camomile Lawn, Toby Stephens. I toy, half-heartedly, with the dreary thought of asking her about the parallels. But the one unambiguous lesson of Stoppard's play is that not only can you not hope to understand someone else's relationship, it's close to impossible to know your own. So I ask about love.
'Ah,' she sighs, with romantic irony, 'love.' And then the photographer walks in and demands that we move to the other room, in which a couple of actors are having lunch. She poses for the camera and pulls faces at me between shots but the moment for heartfelt confession has passed. The next day I call her and re-pose the question. 'Love is such a silly word,' she replies, reaching for an adequate definition for the oldest of human follies. 'It's like the play suggests, you don't know if something is real until the sex drug has worn off.'
She says she feels ill-qualified to talk about the strains and stresses of emotional commitment because she's never 'gone through to the other side' of a relationship, the normalised period, I take it, in which life calms down and you increasingly lose the struggle not to break wind in bed.
On a more philosophical level, Ehle appears fascinated by the subject. It strikes me that Stoppard's play, first staged in 1982, while timeless in many respects, also refers to a more idealistic age, when so-called open marriages were openly discussed. Now, I think, marital expectations are less flexible, marriages more brittle, and deceit arguably more widespread. Ehle isn't sure but she says the play has been thoroughly rethought. 'Deconstruction is a word that's been thrown around a lot in rehearsals.'
Next to contemporary dramas such as Patrick Marber's Closer, that examine emotional trust and romantic doubt with brutally comic candour, The Real Thing could easily seem wilfully elusive. There are, though, in the gaps around Stoppard's intellectual barbs, worlds of possibility and Ehle, I suspect, has the intelligence and subtlety to suggest them to the audience.
Half an hour after we finish talking, the phone rings. It's Ehle. 'I've been thinking about the play,' she says. 'It's not necessarily optimistic about love but it is hopeful.' And in case anyone might be wondering about the love life of the woman herself, there is no gossip, she insists. 'I'm not married, I'm not engaged and I'm not pregnant.' I think she's getting the knack of this interview lark.
• The Real Thing 27 May-7 August at Donmar Warehouse, London WC2 (0171 369 1732)