Jennifer Ehle isn't yet a big name in films, and that's all right with her.
NEW YORK -- One of the stranger distinctions made in Hollywood is that between 'lead' actors and 'character' actors, a differentiation made even more bizarre when you consider that the terms are not a reflection of talent. In crass terms, a lead actor is a movie star. And a character actor is not.
A new film called Possession, opening Friday, inadvertently offers an interesting look at this very phenomenon. The film, based on the A.S. Byatt novel, links past and present and tells two separate love stories. Gwyneth Paltrow and Aaron Eckhart play contemporary academics, and Jennifer Ehle and Jeremy Northam play Victorian poets.
We all know what Shakespeare said about comparisons, but let's go: Both Gwyneth Paltrow and Jennifer Ehle are the daughters of actors. Paltrow's mother is Blythe Danner; Ehle's mom is theatre great Rosemary Harris, recently seen on the big screen as Aunt May in Spiderman.
Paltrow is almost 30 and Ehle is 32, so they're about the same age. Both women have long hair and lovely smiles and both have careers in England and America simultaneously.
But Paltrow is a movie star.
And Ehle is not. On purpose. You'd love her on sight.
Despite knowing since the age of 15 that she would pursue acting, Jennifer Ehle has gone out of her way to avoid the whole glam movie star routine. And no, she's not precious about it, but thank you for asking.
She says she learned some of this from her mother. "The theatre world is very private. You don't do as much publicity. I was brought up that it was important to maintain your privacy, that it was not necessary to raise your profile in order to get work. I like the fact that I live my life that way, as much as I have been able to."
Her privacy is maintained, from what we can glean, by the fact that Ehle keeps her head down and her mouth shut. She will say she was married last November; she won't say to whom. Is he an actor?
"No! I'm no fool." She has a great laugh.
The actor, daughter of novelist John Ehle, was born in North Carolina and spent her childhood travelling and changing schools -- 18 times -- around her mother's work. Enough of that time was spent in England that even the English believe Ehle to be British. When Sir Peter Hall asked her to be in the UK TV miniseries The Camomile Lawn, Ehle dropped out of school to pursue her career.
She has done extensive theatre work and has had parts in such films as Backbeat, Paradise Road and Wilde. In Sunshine, she and her mother played the same character at different stages of life. Ehle is probably best known for her starring role in Pride & Prejudice, for which she won a BAFTA in 1996. She has also won a Tony in America for her performance as Annie in Tom Stoppard's The Real Thing -- one of the few roles, she says, that has ever won her fan attention on the street.
"People don't recognize me. I don't really do actorly things, go to those restaurants, those fashion shows. For the most part, I seem to get away with it."
She's not ambitious?
"Sometimes I think I am, sometimes I think I'm not," she says, slowly. "The whole thing of not wanting to be famous is a kind of ambition, in the same way that a woman who never wears makeup can be seen as being vain. I'm not interested in a trajectory, but I want to be proud of the work I do. I'm a snob about what I choose to do. And I think that's probably quite ambitious."
Ehle would be the first to point out that even though she avoids a Hollywood lifestyle, Hollywood hasn't exactly been beating down her door. "And if something came up, I'd be interested. But it hasn't come up." Meanwhile, she knows that all this low profile stuff has its down side. "I'm trying to get a mortgage right now," she says, sighing and laughing at the same time, "which is hard if you've spent your adult years without gaining a credit history. My mother suggested I tell the bank I'm Spiderman's cousin."