Jennifer Anne Ehle is an American-English actress of stage and screen.
She is perhaps best known for her role as Elizabeth Bennet in the successful 1995 miniseries
Pride and Prejudice, which won her the BAFTA TV Award for Best Actress.
She made her West End debut in 1991 in Peter Hall's production of Tartuffe, and joined
the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1995.
She has won two Tony Awards for her work on Broadway, Best Actress in a Play for The Real
Thing in 1999 and Best Featured Actress in a Play for The Coast of Utopia in 2007.
She has appeared in supporting roles in such films as Wilde, Sunshine, The King's Speech,
Contagion, Zero Dark Thirty, RoboCop, and the upcoming Fifty Shades of Grey.
She also starred in the short-lived American television series A Gifted Man.
She is the daughter of English actress Rosemary Harris and American author John Ehle.
Early life Ehle was born in Winston-Salem, North Carolina,
to English actress Rosemary Harris and American author John Ehle.
Her ancestry includes Romanian, English, and German.
Ehle appeared as a toddler in a 1973 Broadway revival of A Streetcar Named Desire, in which
her mother played Blanche DuBois.
She spent her childhood in both the UK and the US, attending 18 different schools, including
Interlochen Arts Academy.
She was raised largely in Asheville, North Carolina.
Her drama training was split between the North Carolina School of the Arts and the Central
School of Speech and Drama in London.
Career Ehle made her West End debut as Orgon's wife
in the 1991 Peter Hall Company production of Tartuffe, for which she won second prize
at the Ian Charleson Awards.
Hall then cast her as Calypso in a 1992 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 1995 television adaptation of Jane Austen's
classic Pride and Prejudice earned her a British Academy of Film and Television Arts award.
After a stint with the Royal Shakespeare Company, she gained her first major feature film role
in Paradise Road.
She continued her career on both stage and screen.
In 2000, she received 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, Ehle 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, and 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 the CBS telefilm The Russell Girl.
In August 2009, it was announced that Ehle would play the character of Catelyn Stark
in the pilot of HBO's Game of Thrones, an adaptation of George R.R.
Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire fantasy book series.
Ehle filmed the pilot episode, but when HBO ordered the series, it was announced that
she would be replaced by Northern Irish actress Michelle Fairley.
Much of the pilot was reshot, with Fairley replacing Ehle in all scenes involving Catelyn
Stark.
Ehle gave up the role for personal reasons, but remains an avid fan of the series.
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.
George was played by her Pride and Prejudice costar Colin Firth.
In 2011, Ehle played Dr. Ally Hextall in Steven Soderbergh's critically acclaimed Contagion.
In the autumn of 2011, Ehle began a costarring role in the American television series A Gifted
Man.
Her character is a ghost who visits with her ex-husband and asks him to assist with her
low-income clinic.
In 2012, Ehle played CIA officer Jessica in Zero Dark Thirty.
In 2014, Ehle played Liz Kline in the remake, Robocop.
She will play Anastasia Steele's mother in the Fifty Shades of Grey film, and was also
cast in Spooks: The Greater Good.
Personal life Ehle married writer Michael Ryan on November
29, 2001, and they have two children: a son, George, born February 6, 2003, and a daughter,
Talulah, born March 4 2009.
Work Film and television
Theatre Awards and nominations
Awards 1991: Ian Charleson Award, Second Prize – as
Orgon's wife in Tartuffe with the Peter Hall Company
1992: Radio Times Award Best Newcomer – The Camomile Lawn
1996: BAFTA TV Award – Pride and Prejudice 2000: Tony Award for Best Lead Actress in
a Play – The Real Thing 2000: Variety Club Award – The Real Thing
2001: Golden Satellite Award for Best Supporting Actress in a Motion Picture Drama – Sunshine
2007: Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Play – The Coast of Utopia
2010: Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture
– The King's Speech Nominations
1997: BAFTA Film Award – Wilde 2000: Outer Critics Circle Award – The Real
Thing 2000: Genie Award nomination – Sunshine
2000: Laurence Olivier Theatre Award – The Real Thing
2007: Outer Critics Circle – The Coast of Utopia
2012: Georgia Film Critics Assoc Best Supporting Actress Zero Dark Thirty
References
External links Jennifer Ehle at the Internet Broadway Database
Jennifer Ehle at the Internet Movie Database