Joy for Jennifer

June 24, 2000

by Sarah Chalmers

When Pride and Prejudice star Jennifer Ehle won the prestigious Tony Award for Best Actress on Broadway, she reduced one fellow nominee to tears, her mother Rosemary Harris. Here the veteran star tells Sarah Chalmers about the triumph - and trauma - of their big night

Rosemary's baby: Jennifer Ehle (Click on the thumbnail for the full picture)

Jennifer Ehle as a young girl with her mother Rosemary Harris (Click on the thumbnail for the full picture)

Rosemary Harris and her daughter Jennifer Ehle laughed out loud when they were asked to move into the aisle seats at this month's Tony Awards where they became the first ever mother and daughter to compete against each other for the same prize at the New York ceremony. "They said all the nominees have to sit on the ouside so it's easier for them to get out," Rosemary says now. "We thought, 'There's really no point; neither of us is going to win', but we didn't want to make a fuss, so we moved."

Of course, as we now know, there certainly was a point - but for the daughter rather than the mother. Jennifer, the beguiling star of The Camomile Lawn and Pride and Prejudice, was announced as Lead Actress In A Play for her role in Tom Stoppard's The Real Thing. Delighted, she leaned forward to hug her tearful mother and equally proud father - the American author John Ehle - before rushing to the stage in her new backless frock to collect the prestigious award.

"I wouldn't be here without my beautiful, beautiful, beautiful parents," she said as Rosemary wept tears of unabashed joy. It was a rare public display of emotion for this stylish Anglo-American family. "When they announced Jennifer's name for the Tony Award," says Rosemary, "it was like being told you had won the Lottery. It was mixture of shock and joy and ecstasy and disbelief. The tears were pouring down my cheeks. I was just so thrilled to lose," she laughs. "Neither of us though we would win, but there was one awful moment - for a split second - when I thought, what would I do if it was me? As a mother you would always rather your daughter won."

Rosemary, who was nominated for her role in Noel Cowward's Waiting in the Wings, won the same award in 1966 for her part in The Lion in Winter. Back then, the awards were not televised and consisted of a small tea party at a New York hotel. She remembers that when she won "everybody in the room turned round to see who I was, because nobody had heard of me." She felt quite out of place, and has used the award as a paperweight ever since. "I am rather proud of it, though. The engraver obviously got carried away with all the Rs in my name and spelt Broadway Star with two Rs!"

One suspects that despite her distinguished career - she was once described as unrivalled in her portrayal of "the romantic female personality in its dauntless pursuit of love, honour, self-sacrifice and the wearing of gorgeous gowns" - the part she has found most fulfilling is that of mother. Certainly, Jennifer is besotted with her mother, to whom she bears an amazing resemblance. She has said: "I was an only, late child. I was spoiled rotten. The three of us are very close." Perhaps it is that closeness which made Jennifer such a late starter in love. When she did, finally, discover boys, she fell for two of her leading men in rapid succession.

First there was Toby Stephens, son of the actors Robert Stephens and Maggie Smith, on the set of the TV drama The Camomile Lawn, in which Jennifer famously appeared nude. "I got into boys very late," she said. "All through drama school I was uninterested. I didn't put out any signals for years." When she and Toby broke up they remained friends. Then came Colin Firth on the set of Jennifer's next triumph, Lizzie Bennet in Pride and Prejudice. In the end, it is said, Jennifer dumped Firth, though all she has said is, "Being on location and acting in a story opposite somebody is incredibly conducive to falling in love."

Her mother, like Jennifer, is one of those people who exude warmth. Now 69, she has an elegant, serene beauty. We meet in her Manhattan apartment, which has a lived-in air, despite the fact it is not the actress's main home, but a base she uses whenever her stage work brings her to New York.

Rosemary speaks often and unselfconsciously of Jennifer. "I don't think she would mind me saying, but it was a stroke of luck she landed the part in The Real Thing. She did an interview in a British paper and said she hadn't worked in seven months, had been going to Starbucks, drinking coffee and going mad. When she told me afterwards what she had said, I said, "No, no, you should just say you are considering things and the right thing hasn't come along yet." But it turned out Tom Stoppard read the interview, called her agent up and said, "Why haven't we seen Jennifer Ehle?" She went along and read for him and got the part."

Rosemary says she has never given her daughter advice on acting, although they have appeared together twice - once as the younger and older version of Calypso in The Camomile Lawn, and again as Valerie, at different ages, in the recently released film Sunshine with Ralph Fiennes. On Tony night, all three members of the family got ready at Rosemary's apartment. It was a giddy affair, for which John dressed in a new tuxedo, Jennifer a new dress and Rosemary put on a favourite trouser suit. Then just as the limousine arrived to take them to the ceremony, calamity struck. "I suddenly had this bright idea that I would take a bottle of champagne and we would drink it in the limousine."

"So I opened the champagne and put it in a plastic bag. But the bag had a hole in it and the bottle went right through it and crashed on the corner of the talbe and spouted champagne all down my suit. I thought, 'What am I going to do? I have nothing else to wear.' So I rushed and got the ironing board out. It was such a farce, everyone was waiting in the car for me and I was covered in champagne. To my amazement, the iron dried it all out and there wasn't a mark, so I carried on downstairs with what remained of the champagne."

Toast of the Town: Jennifer and Rosemary at the Tony Awards - after the champagne disaster (Click on the thumbnail for the full picture)

Rosemary was born in her grandmother's home in Suffolk, but spent the next six years in India. "It's very vivid in my mind," she recalls. "I had an ayah (nursemaid or governess) whom I adored. She taught me all my nursery rhymes in Hindustani, and I can still remember them today." She remembers her mother as "a perfect creature. She didn't work, I suppose she was part of the jazz age. But she was always busy - playing tennis or riding or shooting."

When the family returned to England and war broke out, the family moved to the Cornish village of Mylor, near the River Fal, and it was there, when Rosemary was only 14, that her mother died of pneumonia. "We didn't know she was terribly ill, she was just upstairs in the bedroom with flu for two days. When the doctor came to see her he ordered an ambulance to take her to Falmouth Hospital. We didn't go with her."

When day broke, she and her elder sister learned that her mother was critically ill so they hired a taxi to take them to the hospital, but it was already too late. "I didn't have the remotest idea that I would never see my mother again. It just never occurred to me."

The heartbreak of her mother's death is something Rosemary feels may be part of the reason Jennifer brings her such joy. She is careful not to be over-protective, but admits, "If someone says they are not feeling well, I don't disregard it." Rosemary returned to boarding school after her mother's death, a place where she was "miserably homesick. I felt my life had been blighted and that I would never be truly happy again."

When she left school she flirted with the idea of physiotherapy as a career, but settled instead for the theatre. Her father had written music and her mother loved to act, so as a youngster she was a talented mimic. After a spell at RADA, where she won the Gold Medal, she secured a role as an understudy in a Wilfred Pickles play called The Gay Dog at London's Piccadilly, where her sole task was to look after the dog and "make sure it peed in the interval and not on stage."

But in true fairytale fashion, she auditioned for a role on Broadway in 1952 - and got the part. The young ingenue packed all her belongings into a trunk - including a sewing machine and some pots - and set sail aboard the Queen Mary. The Broadway run was short-lived and Rosemary was soon back in Britain, but her career was on its way (she was dubbed "the prettiest girl on Broadway" by one critic) and her love affair with America had begun.

By 1956 she decided she wanted to make America her home and stayed there at the end of another Broadway run. "I felt freer and less self-conscious in America and as a result I acted better." Three years later she married producer Ellis Rabb and toured America with his rep company. The marriage, however, did not last - she would later say - in part because "I wasn't really a wife, a homemaker."

In the late Sixties she met John Ehle, who would become her second husband. "My friend Bella Spewack, who wrote the script for the Cole Porter musical Kiss Me Kate, telephoned me one evening and said I had to come round, she had just met the man I was going to marry. She said it was like casting a play. He was in town for one day and ended up getting a wife."

The pair wed on the porch of John's North Carolina log-cabin in 1967, which they still own to this day. Two years later, Jennifer was born on what Rosemary calls "the happiest day of my life." With her own new family intact, she could begin to exorcise some of the ghosts of her past. Rosemary's father had died when she was in her early 20s at a time when their relationship was strained because of his repeated infidelities during the war. It was a betrayal the young Rosemary, who adored her mother, could not forgive. When her father remarried four years after her mother's death, Rosemary continued to live with her grandmother.

"I think if he had lived we would have become friends, but at the time I felt he had let my mother down." It is some comfort to Rosemary that her father was aware of her success as an actress, and immensely proud of her. "In his wallet he used to carry a clipping about my award at RADA."

When Jennifer was 14, during one of family's many visits to England, when Rosemary was filming Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse for the BBC, she replaced the saddest memory of all with a gloriously happy one. "Jennifer was the age I was when I lost my mother and I took her to see the house we had lived in at the time. It had a For Sale sign in the garden, and I took some lovely pictures of her walking round the garden and sitting on the same steps I had sat on as a girl. It was very moving to go back with my husband and daughter in happy times."

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