The Real Thing
By Tom Stoppard. Dir: David Leveaux.Stephen Dillane, Jennifer
Ehle, Nigel Lindsay
by Tim Marsh
May 21, 1999
So there I am standing outside the rehearsal rooms where they're working on the first major London revival of Tom Stoppard's 1982 smash-hit The Real Thing, when suddenly Britain's brightest young actress pops her head round the door. 'Do you mind if we don't have lunch?' she asks, whisking me into this bizarre school-gym-like room. 'It's just that when you're rehearsing you get that sluggish feeling after lunch. I prefer to just have fruit. It's quite hard to... I don't know... oh God, I'm starting to sound like an actor. I must shut up.'
When Jennifer Ehle slows down for a second, it's plain to see that she is every bit as vivacious, beautiful and charming as Elizabeth Bennet, the part she played in the BBC TV serialisation of Pride And Prejudice that turned her into a worldwide star. Medium height, short blonde bob, friendly eyes, constant laughter, bundles of energy - she's fidgeting with a set of crayons left on a table one minute, then she's suddenly shinning up a rope hanging from the ceiling.
Yet, despite a remarkable career since dropping out of drama school in 1991 to play Calypso in Peter Hall's TV adaptation of The Camomile Lawn (her CV includes extensive theatre work and films such as Wilde and 1999's Britflick hit This Year's Love), the 1996 Bafta Best Actress turns out to be splendidly unpretentious. 'No, no, don't tell me,' she laughs, when I attempt to show her some pages I downloaded from websites devoted to her, demonstrating the 29-year-old's global impact. Not that this cuts any ice with Jennifer. 'No, keep them away from me. It boggles me. I think it's a very strange concept. I wouldn't look at them because I think it's very unlikely that I would find out anything I don't know already.'
She's also unusually honest, freely admitting to being out of work for seven months before The Real Thing came along. 'I think a lot more actors have a lot more time being unemployed than people realise. At first it seems great. You've got time to drink a lot of coffee, meet your friends, walk everywhere and do all the things you've always wanted to do. But spending too much time navel-gazing can gradually turn you funny. It's happened to me a couple of times and it does do my head in.'
Still, the wait has been worthwhile. The Real Thing is one of Stoppard's sharpest plays, and Annie, originally played by Felicity Kendal, is a wonderful part. 'It is the best job I could imagine,' says Ehle, who actually caught the play on Broadway in the Eighties, when it starred Jeremy Irons and Glenn Close. 'I can't imagine what I got out of it at 13 or 14, but I just loved it. Since then I've read a lot of Tom's work, but Arcadia is the play that made me fall in love with him as a grown-up. It is completely devastating.'
While understandably reluctant to discuss her character ('I've kind of been in the middle of a process and can't comment. At the moment I wouldn't know Annie if she stood up in my soup'), Ehle bubbles with enthusiasm about the play itself. 'It is deceptively accessible. It's amazing how much mining the text will take. You can burrow away there and constantly haul things out. A lot of film scripts can't take that pressure, because they don't have to, the story is told by pictures. It's great to actually have something with a structure that is so solid you can hammer away at it - or as my mother would say, "swing it around like a dead cat".'
This brings us to some spooky off-stage connections between the play and Ehle herself, which even master plot-twister Tom Stoppard couldn't have made up. For starters, in the play Henry is a writer and Annie is an actress. Well, in real life Jennifer's father is the acclaimed American author John Ehle and her mother is the wonderful actress Rosemary Harris.
'I'm sure I probably related to Debbie, the daughter, when I saw The Real Thing for the first time. Especially smoking the fags in the boiler room - but not with my Latin master! But it's nothing like my parents' relationship at all,' she giggles, appalled at the comparison.
Still, the coincidences stretch even further. Annie has an affair with her co-star and, in real life, Ehle had on-screen and off-screen romances with both Toby Stephens (Camomile Lawn) and Colin Firth (the universally fancied Mr Darcy in Pride And Prejudice). Confused? Jennifer Ehle isn't. 'Oh God, not applicable,' she replies sternly, making it quite clear that all idle musings stop here. 'I've gone out with two guys I worked with and I had relationships which lasted a year with both of them. I've done a lot more than those two jobs.'
Are you in love now? 'No. No. No.'
Okey-dokey. I move swiftly on and ask where that utterly distinctive vigour that Ehle invests in all her characters comes from? Is it, perhaps, something to do with her unusual childhood, shuttling between North Carolina, where she was born, and Britain, where her mother comes from? In all Ehle changed schools 18 times. 'No, it wasn't really a problem, particularly in the States. I generally got the piss taken out of me over here. I remember I was cast as Jesus in a Passion play at school when I was 11 or 12. There were three of us, all girls, playing Jesus, but I got to do Palm Sunday. I remember this girl saying, "Who ever heard of an American Jesus!" and feeling devastated. Then I thought, "Who ever heard of a British Jesus?" But the result was I tried to get an English accent as soon as possible.' Amazingly, despite still being able to do a genuine American accent 'when I'm feeling confident', she has no plans to head for Hollywood and the serious fame and megabucks her talent merits. 'No, I don't think I'm going to do that. I think I'd rather stay here and have a nice life.' But, then (despite the blonde dreadlocks she briefly adopted as an antidote to Jane Austen typecasting immediately after Pride And Prejudice), she's no razzle-dazzle young actress-around-town. Her life sounds wonderfully normal. 'Sometimes I take salsa lessons. I'm very bad but I like it. I read. I don't watch telly, but I've got one. I just use it for the PlayStation. And, yes, I still pay my licence.'
Talking of the day-to-day, would one of Britain's top young actresses ever deign to appear in a soap? 'If I thought it could be good. I can't bear not working, but I also can't bear doing something that I don't think has a chance to be good. I'm not great, but I think I would feel trapped if it was too long a commitment. Mmmm, maybe there's a theme here.'
But although she admits that all that moving about in her childhood has left her with permanently itchy feet, Jennifer is finally making an effort to settle down. 'I've actually bought a flat but it took me a year to move into it. I just kept running away. Every time I came to move in I'd go, "No, too simple, got to go, thank you very much, and now I've got to go somewhere else." I've been there for two months now. In a row. Well, almost. I did go away for two weeks.'
Better catch her while you can.
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