| Jennifer Ehle | |
|---|---|
| Born | December 29, 1969 Winston-Salem, North Carolina, United States |
| Occupation | Actress |
| Spouse | Michael Ryan (2001-present) |
| Children | George Ryan Talulah Ryan |
| Parents | John Ehle, Rosemary Harris |
Jennifer Ehle ( /ˈiːliː/; born December 29, 1969) is an Anglo-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.
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Born in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, to English actress Rosemary Harris and American author John Ehle, 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. She spent her childhood between the UK and US, attending 18 different schools including the Interlochen Arts Academy. Her drama training was split between the North Carolina School of the Arts and the Central School of Speech and Drama in London.
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.[1] 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,[2] she gained her first major feature film role in Paradise Road. She continued pursuing a career both on 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.[3] 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.[4]
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 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, but in 2010, it was announced that she would be replaced by Northern Irish actress Michelle Fairley for the main series.[5]
In 2010, Ehle starred alongside John Lithgow in the production of Mr. & Mrs. Fitch presented by Second Stage Theatre.[6] She played Myrtle Logue, wife of King George VI's speech therapist Lionel Logue, in The King's Speech. George VI was played by her Pride and Prejudice co-star, Colin Firth.
In 2011, Ehle played Dr. Ally Hextall in Steven Soderbergh's critically acclaimed Contagion. In the fall of 2011, Ehle began a co-starring role in the 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.[7] She married writer Michael Ryan in December 2001 and they have two children, a son, George, and a daughter, Talulah.[8]
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