In Step With Jennifer Ehle

June 25, 2000

by James Brady

Click on the thumbnail for the full picture. Photo by Eddie Adams

What a truly glorious month for the actress Jennifer Ehle (pronounced "EE-lee"): a Tony Award for The Real Thing and the release of a major new film, Sunshine. What's more, Ms. Ehle was up against some serious competition for Best Actress at the Tonys - most notably Rosemary Harris, who happens to be her mom. (Ms. Harris was nominated for Noel Coward's Waiting in the Wings, which has since closed.)

I spent an afternoon with Jennifer at a New York hotel during her run in Tom Stoppard's play and shortly before Sunshine, co-starring Ralph Fiennes and Ms. Harris, was due out.

The Real Thing had its first run on Broadway on 1984, when Glenn Close also nabbed a Tony for the same role for which Jennifer just won. "I saw it as a young girl the last night Glenn played it," Jennifer said.

Sunshine, which opened this month, is an epic romance about a Hungarian family living through the terror of the Holocaust. "It's a wonderful story that spans three generations, two of them very affected by the war," said Jennifer. She and her mother play the same central character, Valerie, as a young and an older woman. "It's really about identities," she added. "Do you surrender your identity to live? It's a passionate and important story."

Ehle is unmarried and has a flat in London. During her show's limited run, she was living temporarily in New York, a city she knows well. "I was in New York at age 14 because of my mom's career," she told me. "I went to the UN school and later to a school in Santa Monica." She couldn't recall the name, but that may be because she attended 18 schools growing up in a theatrical family.

What's she reading lately? "I just went through a Russian period - Crime and Punishment and everything." While in a stage play or on location for a film, she and a pal are demon card players. "Rummy 500 and then rummy 5000," she said. "We've been playing for years in Australia, Penang, London, L.A."

As we were wrapping up, Jennifer pointed out a publicity poster for Sunshine of a glamorous woman and man kissing. "Look," she said, laughing. "This is bizarre. This woman isn't even in the film."

Since Jennifer Ehle has starred in many British stage and TV productions and has an English accent, I was surprised when she told me she was born in Winston-Salem, N.C. and brough up in nearby Asheville. Growing up, Jennifer often followed her mom's career moves between the U.S. and U.K. "Several years ago," she told me, "I was nearly deported from England and had to get a residency card to stay there." While fighting the bureaucrats, Ehle worked with the Royal Shakespeare Company. Her dad, John Ehle, is a novelist and screenwriter. And since the great novelist Thomas Wolfe was from Asheville, I asked if she'd read his work. "I grew up reading Look Homeward, Angel," she said. "He does go on, doesn't he?"

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