She's a familiar face already but she's being launched all over our television screens yet again - and there's not a corset or bonnet in sight.

After her huge success as Elizabeth Bennet in the costume drama Pride and Prejudice, Jennifer Ehle takes the leading role in Alan Bleasdale's Melissa - on Channel 4 - with words specifically written for her by the man himself.

"I was incredibly flattered," she says. "It's a different experience working with Alan when he's written the piece. I had worked with him when he was the producer. He's a very strong presence, a wonderful, generous man. He cares so deeply."

The leading role Ehle takes in Melissa reflects the new standing she has enjoyed since Pride and Prejudice.

The worry after Pride and Prejudice might easily have been that she'd only ever be hired to give pale imitiations of women in bonnets and bustles. But she says, "I have never been afraid of being typecast as Lizzie. There is no one I've played that I'd rather be associated with and if I am to be typecast, then please - bring on the bonnets."

Melissa is her first truly contemporary role in a while. "When I first read Melissa, I was enchanted by its humour and the world where intelligent, quite spoilt people lived in. Being a self-confessed thriller addict, and proud to be a Bleasdale fan, there was no way I was going to pass Melissa up.

"Figuring Melissa out was like doing a cryptic crossword - something I'm hopeless at. If a character is a sum of her actions, then Melissa was off the map."

"Almost every day of filming I would say, 'What kind of person behaves like this ?' But watching the finished story, it all finally made complete sense to me again."

And yet there are parallels between the actress and her character. Jennifer's father is an American writer; her mother is Rosemary Harris, the British actress.

And she says, "Although Melissa and I have wildly different backgrounds, we do have a sort of rootless upbringing in common. While I was raised partly in America, Melissa spent time growing up in South Africa and there is something very cosmopolitan about her that I recognized and understood. I'm a hybrid."

On screen she's confident, outspoken and sexy, off screen she's coy, demure and...sexy. Alan Jackson meets the alluring Jennifer Ehle

from the Times, 9/20/97

Jennifer Ehle has succumbed to the inevitable and acquired a Hollywood agent. His name is Steve. He makes her laugh. But, she claims, she knows little else about him. "I didn't think I wanted anyone to represent me in Los Angeles. But when I was out there recently, I visited ICM - my agents over here - more out of a sense of politeness than anything else. And there he was, someone I liked and felt I could trust. He's not a schmooze-merchant, and that's essential for me. Schmoozing gives me the giggles. Everybody does it to everybody in LA and I find it hysterical."

Why do these words delight me? Because they represent the longest statement Ehle has made in the ten minutes we have been together so far. She had arrived to meet me in the offices of her London publicist looking as if she would rather be anywhere else - the dentist's included.

"It's nothing personal," she insists, as our conversation bumps and lurches along, interspersed by her apologetic giggles and my attempts at placation. Even so, and due in part to a cuttings file that bears testament to her talent for avoiding probing interviews, I feel I almost know more about nice, funny, schmooze-free Steve than I do about Ehle herself. Still, I do have another 50 minutes in her company.

In person, as on screen, the 27-year-old actress's sense of humour, intelligence and luminous beauty are immediately apparent. It is these qualities which have informed her two most celebrated roles to date, both for television but very different in nature and period. The first was as the wartime siren Calypso in the 1992 adaptation of Mary Wesley's novel The Camomile Lawn, directed by Sir Peter Hall, the second as the bonneted free-spirit Lizzie Bennet in Pride and Prejudice, three years later.

And that intelligence is used to good effect also in her latest role, as Oscar's betrayed wife Constance in the new biopic Wilde (featuring Stephen Fry as the epigram-wielding Irish writing genius, and with Jude Law, Vanessa Redgrave and Gemma Jones in support). In this instance, Ehle's sense of fun is little called upon: Brian Gilbert's direction highlights all the pathos and pain of a personal tragedy, publicly staged. "I know there have been various other film interpretations of the Wilde story, but I haven't see any of them," Ehle comments. "And I'm glad not to have done; that way I came to it fresh. It's a beautiful film, I think, and very moving. I'm very glad to have been involved in it."

In Wilde she shows, often merely by facial expression, how love can be replaced by stoic acceptance and then, ultimately, by humiliation and bitterness; hers is a very particular art, meticulous and unflashy. Thus it seems unlikely that Ehle will be hurrying to take up any of the short-skirted girlfriend roles that Hollywood Steve may be required to pass her way. "Money and stardom? I don't know," she says. "Good work and integrity sound pretty attractive to me right now."

Slowly, meanwhile, we establish the biographical facts. The Anglo-American Ehle is an only child. She was born in Winston Salem, North Carolina, a fact that is ironic, given the general perception of her as a quintessential English rose. Her mother, the acclaimed stage actress Rosemary Harris, was introduced to Jennifer's novelist and biographer father John Ehle by a friend: "A matchmaker, really. Someone who knew absolutely what they were doing, for the two of them are wonderful together."

She declines to say more about this introduction on the grounds that it is their story, not hers, and would be an intrusion. "My parents are very publicity shy, like me. It's definitely in the genes."

Her father's home city is not the Salem of witches and intrigue, but Cigarettesville, USA: "Salems and Winstons and Camels are made there." Ehle describes it as deeply Southern in feel, but otherwise like any other American community of a certain size and sophistication. "Nobody walks anywhere - unless they're power-walking. Everyone drives. It's a good place though, with a rich arts community. North Carolina is the third biggest state for film-making, probably because it doesn't have any union laws, so labour is cheap. And the Institute for the Performing Arts is based there. My father was always very involved in that side of life. In the Sixties, he was taken on board as an arts adviser to the Democratic governor. "

Many of John Ehle's stories are based in the nearby Appalachian Mountains, where the family retains a cabin. Miramax recently approached him to write the screenplay of one, The Journey of August King, and the film is now on general release in America, starring Jason Patric. However, it was Ehle's mother's work that determined the threesome's whereabouts. They moved frequently around America and back and forth to England while Ehle was growing up, with the result that she can claim to have changed school 18 times: "Dad would just pick up his typewriter and me and off we'd go."

Among Ehle's earliest memories is one of being fussed over backstage at the Lincoln Center, New York, as her mother rehearsed for A Streetcar Named Desire. "I suppose that well-known names and faces came and went throughout my childhood," she reflects. "But the life of a stage actress is vastly different to that of a film star, particularly in its public side, so I wasn't as much aware of the celebrity angle as you might imagine. What struck me most about mum's work was that she seemed to have a lot of fun doing it. That had great appeal, as did the idea of pretending to be other people."

When, inevitably, I ask if she always knew she would become an actress herself, Ehle's suddenly-gesturing hand knocks over the glass of water she's been nursing, and the answer is lost in a mess of embarrassed laughter, apologies and mopping-up. And when I venture the question a second time, she twists her body back and forth, swings around on her chair and, for a moment or two, contemplates the Band Aid wrapped around one of her bare toes.

"I knew you'd ask me, and I was trying to work out the answer when I woke at 4.30 this morning in a panic about having to meet you," she manages eventually. "If only we'd talked on the telephone then, or met somewhere for coffee, I'm sure I'd have been more lucid."

There follows her externalisation of a mental ping-pong game: on the one hand, she probably always knew; on the other, there must have been some specific moment of realisation. Back and forth we go until finally she lays her arms down on the wet table and sinks her head into them.

A pause. Then, as if coming up from under water, she raises her head. "I always knew - or not. I don't know," she pronounces. "It just happened. My God, I'm sorry about this, my inability to make sense." And then there is more body-scrunching and awkward laughter, until she seems like a little girl, self-conscious but somehow empowered to find herself the subject of such rigorous scrutiny.

Ehle calms herself to address the issue of why she decided to enrol at London's Central School of Speech and Drama rather than any US equivalent. "I think I was a bit frightened of America. It's so huge, and there's so little theatre, and the film industry . . . well, I didn't think I'd get a look in. I didn't think I could compete in that arena. It's so much to do with looks and cosmetic [here she uses her hands to suggest a silicone-enhanced cleavage] impact. There's a template for what's attractive, and I don't fit it and never have. Even though England can be equally intimidating, it's your talent rather than your looks that counts. I preferred that, and the idea of a smaller pond."

But asked if the course lived up to her expectations (she quit, part way through her final year, having been cast as Calypso in The Camomile Lawn), Ehle collapses into a pantomine of agony and anguish again, suggesting it might not have. "I don't know," she concludes, her hands now clasped demurely before her, so that she is the very model of coyness and discretion. "I have nothing to compare it to." And then, "Oh, my God, I'm agape," she howls, fumbling to fasten an unruly button on the front of her dress.

Having regained her composure, she admits it never crossed her mind to turn down the part. "I was so thrilled to get what was only the third job I'd been up for. Obviously I'd been very nervous about it, so much so that I kept on my huge winter coat throughout the audition. Afterwards my agent called and said, 'They thought you were good, but wondered why you kept your coat on. They asked if you might be ill.' In truth, it was just that it felt comforting and self-protective."

Ehle directs her winning, beatific smile at me and then, turning on a sixpence, races back to answer a previous question. "Drama school was fine, by the way," she says urgently. "I didn't really enjoy it, no, but that had nothing to do with the school. It was just that, for some reason, I became much more confident as soon as I was employed. I'd found being scrutinised by peers intensely difficult - paralysing, really. Perversely, I really enjoy auditions; yes, you're being judged, but it's usually by strangers. And I think I have competition blindness. Although I still don't get jobs I want, I don't take it personally. You're either right for a part or you're not."

The Camomile Lawn was a dream of a debut vehicle: a rollicking story line and a distinguished ensemble cast, but also a kit-off quotient (Ehle's sex scenes with co-star Toby Stephens, most notably) significant enough to excite the tabloids. Within months of leaving her studies, shots taken from the television of a naked Ehle were being printed for the inspection of Sun and Mirror readers. "Yes, I was in the tabloids," she says, adding witheringly, "where, of course, everyone aspires to be. And I've been there ever since. I think my favourite headline was 'Sex-Mad Jenni Does It Froggy-Style', after I filmed Melissa in France for Alan Bleasdale."

Ehle says she had no qualms about screen nudity, but had not anticipated such an excited public reaction. And she claims not to be aware that it was well-received critically. "Was it? I stopped reading the reviews after the first one I picked up said I sounded like a horse with laryngitis."

Despite other well-received television performances, including those as an army wife in Beyond Reason, and as a desert island castaway in the black comedy Self-Catering, it was the role in Pride and Prejudice which brought Ehle to mass recognition (it also won her the 1996 Bafta for Best Actress). She followed that up with a stint for the RSC in Stratford, and has recently played a prisoner of war alongside Glenn Close and Pauline Collins in the Bruce Beresford film, Paradise Road. She was most recently on our television screens as the female lead in the overheated thriller Melissa, and has just started work on Bedrooms And Hallways, a film for director Rose Troche.

Ehle had intended to take some time out from her hectic schedule, but it didn't really work out. "I went looking for a life," she shrugs. "I'd been working solidly for two years and didn't feel under any pressure to rush into another job. I was helped by the fact that nothing had come up, so I spent some time in America. But I failed to find a life, which is why I'm back at work again." There follows more laughter and body-scrunching, then the accidental breaking of the swizzle-stick she has been twirling: "I'm terribly sorry," she says again, hiding the pieces behind her back.

It is only when I finally turn off my tape machine that Ehle relaxes, and visibly so. Was it really so very awful, I ask? There are more apologies, it's-absolutely-nothing-personals and actually-I've-got-friends-who-are-journalists, and then the justification for her reticence: that acting requires the suspension of disbelief from an audience, and that the more they know about a performer's offstage self, the less able they are to effect that suspension.

Well, I remind her, at least I didn't ask the question she was doubtless most dreading - whether she is in a relationship (she has previously been linked with co-stars Stephens and Colin Firth, the unforgettable Mr Darcy in Pride And Prejudice).

Ehle's eyes flash. "I'm sure I don't need to tell you that I think it's nobody's business, and that I wouldn't have answered your question anyway," she says. Then seconds later suggests, "Why don't you write that I flung a glass of water over you when you had the temerity to ask it? That way, you'll look like you did your duty, and I won't be made to look clumsy."

We part, and she is all warmth and charm. "Really, and I mean it, it has actually been very nice to meet you. I've enjoyed it," she insists. Walking out into the Soho street though, I feel as dentists must do when patients slip gratefully away, leaving them garlanded with farewells and thanks coloured by blessed but guilty relief.

by Christopher Hemblade
from Empire Magazine, 11/97

Toned, buxom and handsome of face, Jennifer Ehle looks like she's up for a laugh. But, like the character that herded her into the pen marked fame (that's Pride and Prejudice's Lizzy Bennet to those marooned in Greenland these last three years) she is not inclined to be promiscuous with conversation.

"I like to be private. I was always quite shy. That was what was liberating about acting. It was that moment when I stopped being terrified doing something in front of people and suddenly slipped through a barrier. And that is addictive. I think it does gradually open people up, like any exercise. If you love what pays the rent it is pretty special."

Ehle (pronounced Ee-lee) rarely gives interviews, having never warmed to the business of talking about her craft.

"I don't think I have to dye my hair green to get attention. I'm no different with a journalist than I am with any stranger when talking about stuff that is quite intimate. I am as careful as I would be natural in the circumstance. Everything I say will be transcribed; that's a little strange."

In this respect, Ehle's proclivity for irony (for example: "Would you want to play a babe ?" Answer: "Babe the pig you mean ?") doesn't sit well on the page.

"There is nothing you can do about the fact that irony doesn't come across in print and you have to accept that sometimes you are going to look like a prat."

The reason she is suffering to talk about herself now is this month's film role as Oscar Wilde's wife Constance Lloyd in Brian Gilbert's biopic Wilde.

"It is different when there is a point to it and it is something you really love. Wilde is really special because it's the job I've loved doing the most. I've never been on set with such a positive atmosphere. There was no one negative. Sorry journalism, there is no conflict to report."

The role of Wilde's wife is a slight one but, with the same dextrous ease with which she glided through The Camomile Lawn and the aforementioned Pride and Prejudice, she is unobtrusively affecting.

Unsurprisingly, Ehle is RSC trained (aargh, those honeyed tones), a well bred daughter (she uses the words "terribly", "horrible" and "rather" too many times to pass as anything but posh) of a theatre practitioner mother and writer father, John Ehle.

"I think it was easier because my parents understood the business. They never asked, 'How do you learn all those lines ?' They understand it is not always as it seems."

But despite her enthusiasm for her greasepaint background, she has been less successful in dealing with actors in her own emotional life. Linked with both Colin Firth and Toby Stephens, she reportedly said she needed to stay out of relationships with actors.

"Hmmm," she responds today, staring out the window and clearly disliking the line of questioning. "I don't know the answer to that because I haven't discovered one. Everyone is different. I grew up with an actor/writer combo and it seemed to work pretty well. I don't think there is a special formula; it's just chemistry."

As the conversation progresses, it becomes apparent Ehle is at pains to offend no one. Such magnanimity is in equal parts admirable and disingenuous. She will excuse the hypocrisy of a public that celebrated and, two short breaths later, vilified Oscar Wilde. ("You can't blame them for ignorance, that was the norm.") She can also positively rationalise Wilde's treatment of his wife. ("I don't think he treated her badly.")

But wasn't he banging every man he met ?

"He was courageous to the point of foolishness. He always flew in the face of what was discreet behaviour. Is it courage if belief is an intrinsic part of a person ?"

It is difficult to decide if this is romantic or naive.

As for the more subtle forms of prejudice and ignorance that exist today, Ehle is again reticent to comment. Is there an acceptability to prejudice when it is given a gloss ?

"I think there is truth in that. I think. But I probably don't want to go into it too much."

Why not ?

"Because if you're an actor and you become an oracle, then you've stepped out of your place. Certainly in the 80s, and less so now, there was a reactionary morality that did creep into the mainstream in a Trojan Horse guise. It was presented as good fun gossip. But maybe it is a bit more malignant than that. It doesn't encourage empathy and the ability to do that is very important."

Empathy is something Ehle was forced to explore in her role as a woman prisoner of war alongside Glenn Close in the upcoming Paradise Road.

"Humans are so adaptable. We began filming in sequence. It was very shocking at first and then you got used to it and just wanted to get back to your card game."

Predictably, Ehle has nothing but praise for Close ("So down-to-earth and normal after so much success.")

Ehle will next film Bedrooms and Hallways with Go Fish helmer Rose Troche.

"I was impressed by the acting and particularly impressed by the directing form of Go Fish."

You can't hate a girl for being nice. But a badmouth is certainly more fun. That said, as the flashes of irony prove, Ehle is more fun than she likes to make out...

Much Ado Behind the Smile

She's sharp, half-American. Jasper Rees asks Jennifer Ehle why she plays so many submissive English roses

from the Sunday Telegraph, 10/12/97

Jennifer Ehle was first presented to us in the guise of a well-bred gold-digging nymphomaniac, Calypso, in The Camomile Lawn was a strong note to come in on, a handsome character role rather than a mere kit-shedding floozie, but she is looking more and more like an almighty red herring. Ehle has scarcely been seen horizontally since, or played anyone quite so indifferent to her own intellect.

Her newest incarnation is as Constance Wilde in Brian Gilbert's new film Wilde - not her first spurned wife of an icon who dies in his forties. She was Cynthia Lennon in Backbeat (which from where she was standing might as well have been called "Backseat"), and her moon face is well shaped for the long-suffering adoration germane to both women - eyes that crease up in kindness, the mile-wide you-win smile, the indulgent sideways stoop to the neck.

This could be a fruitful line for Ehle to follow. You can see her being glacial in chunky shades as Jackie Kennedy. "Yes, please," she says. "Though I'm not the right shape to wear all those Chanel suits."

She turns up blonde and bobbed in jeans and leather jacket, the sort of outfit you never see her wearing on screen. It's as if she's determined to present the version of herself that hangs loose, to counter the reputation she has mysteriously gained for being one of those actresses who's allergic to interviews. There is, to be sure, a moment of acute self-consciousness when the record button is first pressed, but it passes, and it turns out that she has far more to say about the job of being Jennifer Ehle than she thinks she does.

The only time she doesn't give a straight answer is when asked her age. At one point, she's 26, the same age as Constance Wilde. A bit later she blurts out, "I'm 27, by the way. People keep telling me to lie but I'm so useless at it."

The clue to the real Ehle is in a role she renounced when Peter Hall extracted her from drama school to play Calypso. "I missed my big part in the third year," she says. "I was going to be Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing." There's a sense in which she has been casting around for roles which display that independence of spirit ever since.

She got closest in Pride and Prejudice, when she and Colin Firth were gloriously jousting in what were known on set as "Beatrice-Benedick moments." "The sparring and the fencing and the love-hate - there are similarities. We did talk about that quite a lot - that thing of 'God we fancy the pants off each other but I just hate your guts'." (Her off-screen involvement with Firth may have added a certain frisson to the performance as well.)

If she plans to play Beatrice one day, another aim is to act opposite her mother, Rosemary Harris. So far they have parcelled out Calypso, whose older self was played by Harris, a rare case of a famous parent getting a job on the strength of a resemblance to an unknown offspring. "On and off for the last couple of years we've discussed Mrs. Warren's Profession, just while making toast in the morning. But we keep our ear to the ground for mother-daughter projects."

It would make biographical sense, as much of her life has been shaped by her mother's career. When the Jane Austen Protection League issued their diktat that Ehle had been criminally miscast as Elizabeth Bennet, the information that she speaks with the hint of a pukka North Carolina twang was, thankfully, withheld from them.

The English Harris married an eighth-generation Appalachian, the author John Ehle. Father and only daughter tagged along wherever the acting jobs happened to be - predominantly on Broadway, but there was a stint in London when Ehle was entering her teens. By rights she should be as psychologically mangled as the next intinerant star's child, but somehow seems not to be. "I've never added up how many schools there were. But I changed schools 18 times."

When the time came to choose her own school, she rejected the Juilliard in New York for Central School of Speech of Drama in London. "England is the best place to come if you want a classical training," she says, and she has deployed that training in a season's worth of roles at the Royal Shakespeare Company, most notably as Lady Anne - opposite David Troughton's Richard III.

When she won the part of Calypso she did her best to conceal her lineage. "I didn't think it was relevant. It's hard to say it was out of principle without sounding completely pretentious. I assumed that Peter Hall knew anyway."

In fact Hall had half-rumbled her. "When I was reading, he wrote down 'Rosemary Harris's voice'. He couldn't quite figure out the American connection and eventually the only explanation I could give was that my mother was an actress, and then he said, 'Who is she ?'"

Having anglicised her career, Ehle has never yet actually played an American. She makes her debut in a big, partly American film called Paradise Road, set in the Japanese internment camps for women, to be released here in December. It is directed by Bruce Beresford, and also stars Glenn Close and Frances McDormand, but Ehle plays the distinctly unAmerican Rosemary Leighton-Jones.

"I've done a couple of English roses and she's definitely one of them. There are not that many parts for Americans over here anyway. Usually if it's an American part it has been written in because they want an American name who will bring in American money. So it's unlikely they're going to cast a not-very-well-known British actress."

Paradise Road has done no more than acceptably in America, but the next crack at that market will come with Wilde. Hers is the biggest female role in the film, though given the subject that's not saying much. But wherever possible she gives off more than just that low dependable 40-watt I'm-not-the-star-in-this-one glow she can do with her eyes shut.

[Note: Don't read the following paragraph if you don't want to know about a part of the movie !!!] Her finest scene is when she visits Wilde in prison and offers him access to the children so long as he agrees never to see Bosie again. Her husband replies (somewhat implausibly) that if he saw Bosie now he'd kill him, and the flicker of a triumphant smile skips cruelly across Ehle's lips. It is the subtlest detail, but is enough to show Constance as more than just a tragic doormat.

The moment chimes in with a letter Ehle recently received about Alan Bleasdale's Melissa. "It said: 'You really improved in Melissa. At first you were an awful Sloane and then the director corrected your performance and you got better and you softened.' I thought, Oh no no, you've missed the entire point."

"Sometimes actors make a choice to play someone who doesn't have a particularly attractive personality. It's very tempting to be pleasing and use charm. But it's often more challenging to resist that temptation."

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