Born December 29, 1969 in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, Jennifer Ehle is an American actress of stage and screen. She is known for her BAFTA winning role as Elizabeth Bennet in the 1995 mini-series Pride and Prejudice.
Jennifer Ehle is the daughter of novelist John Ehle (The Journey of August King, Winter People) and English actress Rosemary Harris (Tom and Viv, Hamlet, Looking for Richard). Ehle made her stage debut as a toddler in a 1973 Broadway revival of A Streetcar Named Desire, in which her mother played Blanche Dubois. Born in North Carolina, Jennifer changed schools 18 times growing up in order to follow her mother’s frequent moves as an actress. She attended London’s Central School of Speech and Drama.
In 1992, Peter Hall cast her as Calypso in a television adaptation of Mary Wesley’s novel The Camomile Lawn, in which she and her mother played the same character at different ages. This story, produced by UK’s Channel 4, was a five part miniseries about the lives and loves of a family of cousins from 1939 to the present. The two would later reprise this different age portrayal of a character as Valerie in István Szabó’s 1999 movie Sunshine.
Her performance as Elizabeth Bennet in the BBC/A&E Network 1995 television adaptation of Jane Austen’s classic Pride and Prejudice gained her a British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) award. After a stint with the Royal Shakespeare Company, she gained her first major feature film role in Paradise Road. She continued pursuing a career on both stage and screen. In 2000, she earned further critical acclaim for her Broadway debut as Annie in Tom Stoppard’s The Real Thing; winning both a Theatre World Award and the Tony Award for Best Performance by a Leading Actress in a Play. Her mother was also nominated for the same award that year for Waiting in the Wings. After a hiatus, she returned to the stage in 2005 in The Philadelphia Story at the Old Vic opposite Kevin Spacey. The following year, she played Lady Macbeth in Macbeth as part of the Shakespeare in the Park. She won her second Tony award for portraying three characters in Stoppard’s The Coast of Utopia triptych, which ran from October 2006 until May 2007.
Her more recent film work includes Before the Rains, an Indian-US co-production directed by Santosh Sivan, and Pride and Glory with Edward Norton and Colin Farrell. In 2008, she was featured in a CBS telefilm, The Russell Girl. In 2010, Ehle starred alongside John Lithgow in the production of Mr. & Mrs. Fitch presented by Second Stage Theatre. She played Myrtle Logue, wife of King George VI’s speech therapist Lionel Logue, in The King’s Speech. Her Pride and Prejudice co-star, Colin Firth, played George VI. In 2011, Ehle played Dr. Ally Hextall in Steven Soderbergh’s critically acclaimed Contagion. In the fall of 2011, Ehle will be co-starring in an American television series A Gifted Man. Her character is a ghost who visits with her ex-husband and asks him to run her low-income clinic.
During the filming of Pride and Prejudice, Ehle began a brief relationship with co-star Colin Firth. She married writer Michael Ryan in December 2001 and they have two children, a son, George, and a daughter, Talulah.
Jennifer Ehle Photo Gallery
