June 29, 2000
by Joshua Mooney
Opening nights and family don't mix, according to theater legend Rosemary Harris.
"I hate my family coming opening night; I won't let them," says Harris, who was nominated for a Tony Award this year for her acclaimed Broadway performance in Noel Coward's Waiting in the Wings.
Even an actress with more than 40 years of experience still gets butterflies. "I tell my family, 'Don't come. Let me do my job and get on with it. We'll party afterward,' " says Harris.
Harris' case of opening-night jitters is mild compared to her daughter Jennifer Ehle's family phobias. Ehle also was up for a Tony this year for her galvanizing Broadway debut in Tom Stoppard's The Real Thing. (On Sunday, she won the Tony for best performance by a leading actress in a play.) She and Harris were in competition, but Ehle's mom says she hasn't seen her daughter's performance--and might never see it.
"She won't let me," Harris says. "She's at that stage in her development when she does not want people she knows out front."
Harris understands. "I can't act in front of my sister," she says. "I know I'm throwing a performance out the window if she's there because she knows me too well. There you are, trying to be a grand lady in front of someone who's known you since you've been an impossible brat. It's difficult."
The dueling Tony nominations are a coincidence, but the actresses's pairing on a recent movie project couldn't be more intentional. They both play the same character in Hungarian director Istvan Szabo's compelling drama Sunshine, a film about familial connections. Sunshine -- which opened in limited release earlier this month explores three generations of a Hungarian Jewish family in the 20th century. Harris and Ehle play the family matriarch, Valerie Sonnenschein/Sors, at different times in her life.
Sunshine, which is three hours long, is epic in more than just size. Szabo, who won the 1981 Oscar for best foreign film, takes on the history of much of the 20th century as it affects one family. (There are echoes of Szabo's own family history in the story.) The film is concerned with love, loyalty, betrayal, war, death and inhumanity. It is also a profound meditation on the importance of family and of connections between the generations.
Hence Harris and Ehle -- mother and daughter -- play one character. And, in the film's other intriguing casting ploy, actor Ralph Fiennes (The English Patient, Schindler's List) plays three characters: Ignatz, Adam and Ivan Sonnenschein/Sors -- grandfather, father and son. As one generation passes away, another rises to take its place, and Fiennes is at the helm of each one.
Sunshine and the role of Valerie came first to Ehle. After she was cast, her mother signed on. In a sense, Ehle ended up in the film thanks to Glenn Close and Cate Blanchett, two of her co-stars in the 1997 World War II drama Paradise Road.
"Glenn told me while we were making that film, 'If you ever get a chance to work with Istvan Szabo, do it,' " Ehle says. "And long after that, I ran into Cate Blanchett, who told me she'd just read a script and a part that would be perfect for me. It was Sunshine and Valerie. A couple days later, the script was sent to me."
Once Ehle agreed to play Valerie as a young woman, Szabo approached Harris about playing Valerie in the twilight of her life. It was "the second time I've ridden on my daughter's coattails," Harris notes. The two had actually played the same role (a woman at different stages in her life) once before in an English TV movie called The Camomile Lawn.
Harris has worked onstage with such legends as Richard Burton, Peter O'Toole, Laurence Olivier and Michael Redgrave. Her work in films has included The Boys From Brazil and, more recently, Tom & Viv, for which she received an Oscar nomination.
She and her husband, novelist and screenwriter John Ehle, raised Jennifer as a child of the theater, an upbringing that included frequent jaunts between London and New York. Yet Harris was surprised when Ehle came to her as a teen-ager and announced she wanted to be an actress.
"I said, 'Why?' " Harris recalls. "She said, 'Mom, why wouldn't I? You have so much fun.' I couldn't deny that."
Having an actress for a mother also took away one of the joys of choosing an acting career. "You lose out on the running-away-to-join-the-circus element of becoming a performer, which I happen to think is quite important," says Ehle. "That sense of rebellion, of saying, 'I'm gonna do it my way.' For me to do it 'my way,' I would have had to become a doctor or lawyer, I suppose. But then I didn't have the education for that."