We have had too little of Jennifer Ehle since Pride and Prejudice, so it's great to see her back in Possession, says David Eimer
It has been seven years since Jennifer Ehle played Elizabeth Bennet in the BBC's wildly successful adaptation of Pride and Prejudice. However, in stark contrast to her co-star Colin Firth, she remains an elusive figure who pops up in art-house films and the occasional play and who avoids the press like the plague. Ehle rarely gives newspaper interviews, so it is something of a shock when she arrives in a New York hotel room and offers a shy smile as a greeting.
Not that she acts like a recluse or in a precious manner. She smiles a lot, maybe out of nerves, but when she does start speaking it's a surprise to hear that, far from sounding like Miss Bennet, Ehle's accent is stranded in mid-Atlantic. "I don't know how people in Bermuda sound, but I think it should be like this," she jokes. Jane Austen probably would not be amused to know that the woman who has come to personify her most famous heroine was born in North Carolina and mostly raised in the States.
Ehle rarely gets to use her natural voice on screen, and that is the case with her latest and most high-profile film yet, Neil LaBute's adaptation of AS Byatt's 1990 Booker Prize-winning novel, Possession. The story of two academics who stumble across a cache of love letters from two Victorian poets and who set out to retrace their affair, it moves between the 19th century and the present day, with Ehle and Jeremy Northam playing the poets and Gwyneth Paltrow and Aaron Eckhart as the sleuthing swots.
Perhaps predictably, Ehle and Northam are more convincing in their roles than their American counterparts. There's a febrile quality to Ehle's performance as Christabel LaMotte, a woman torn between her female lover and Northam's intense Randolph Ash. Just as she demonstrated in Pride and Prejudice, she has the rare ability to let her expressive face do the talking for her in many scenes.
"She's a wonderful character," says Ehle, whose surname is pronounced E-lee, like the Fenland town. "It's always interesting playing somebody who's such an enigma. In the book, she's hidden behind different veils, different bits of her emerge in different parts of the book. It's hard to do that on film. So basically I relinquished all control pretty quickly and decided to trust Neil and do each scene as it stands, and just hope that it all adds up to a whole person by the end."
Christabel spends much of the movie shrouded in a cape, and, given Ehle's vague resemblance to Meryl Streep, it's all rather reminiscent of The French Lieutenant's Woman. Ehle, though, doesn't mind the Streep comparisons. "It's been going on a while, because when I was at school I had a maths teacher who used to call me Miss Streep. I take it as a great compliment, because she's one of my all-time favourite actresses and I think she's very beautiful."
LaBute's involvement in such a restrained project seems unlikely, considering that his first two films, In the Company of Men and Your Friends & Neighbors, were caustic, controversial pieces that earned him a reputation as a virulent misogynist. Ehle claims that's not the case. "I never thought he was misogynistic, because the men in those films are so miserable and lonely. Then I met him and he's just this big, generous soul and any preconceptions I may have had about him were shattered."
Of course, she also knows what it's like to be stereotyped. The 32- year-old has found it nearly impossible to break away from her image as an actress who works best in corsets, and apart from the little-seen 1999 Brit flick This Year's Love, she's almost only played period roles on film. "It's never bothered me, because I find, so far, that there aren't many good contemporary female parts, and the ones there are go to people who are famous."
It is a typically self-deprecating comment from Ehle, who has a wry, rather resigned sense of humour and who gives the impression that she isn't overflowing with confidence. She believes that the way she looks is part of the reason why she isn't cast as modern characters. "I don't have a contemporary figure, I certainly don't have a Hollywood figure," she notes. "I've never been a waif and I never will be, so my body probably looks better in period clothes."
More likely is the fact that the impact she made in Pride and Prejudice was such that it continues to influence the way she is perceived in the industry. She won a deserved Bafta for playing Bennet, even if she managed to sidestep the media attention that came with it. "I was at the RSC when it came out and quite depressed. You know, a year in a small town with 90 actors is a long year. But being in Stratford meant that in a lot of ways it didn't touch me at all. I think Colin Firth had all that in a much bigger way."
But if Ehle avoided the press, she soon found out that the public are a different matter. "I had a couple of people who became obsessed with Elizabeth Bennet and who came to find me, but they were always very nice and respectful. They never seemed to model themselves on Mr Darcy, because if they had then they'd have just stayed at home and looked out of a window in moody fashion," she laughs.
"I did get a lot of fan mail, and for the first year I answered it all, which was almost a full-time job. I was quite lonely at the time, so that was virtually all I did. People wrote extraordinary things and they all wanted to talk to Lizzy, and obviously I wasn't Lizzy. Then I'd get these letters from little girls who wanted to be Elizabeth Bennet. It had a weird power over people, I don't know why. But then I started getting offered work."
Roles in Paradise Road, Wilde and opposite Ralph Fiennes in Sunshine followed. That was notable because her mother, the English actress Rosemary Harris, played the older version of her character. Harris married the American writer John Ehle and moved to the USA long before Jennifer was born. She is much better known there, where she is something of a fixture on Broadway, than in the UK. Most recently, she played Peter Parker's aunt in Spider-Man.
Even though Ehle has followed in her mother's footsteps, even by marrying an American writer, Michael Ryan, last year, she claims she had no plans to be an actor when she was growing up in various bits of the States. "I'm an only child, so we were a very portable family and we went wherever my mother was working. I wanted to be a writer until I went to an arts boarding school in Michigan when I was 15."
Ironically, it was her lack of confidence that brought her to London and the Central School of Speech and Drama when she was 18. "I got into Juilliard as well as Central, but I was too scared to stay in America as an actor," recalls Ehle. "Anyone with any sense would have been more intimidated about going to England, but for some reason I wasn't. I think I just felt more comfortable there."
Two years ago she returned to the States, when the London production of Stoppard's The Real Thing she was starring in transferred to Broadway. Ehle found herself working just down the road from her mother. They were both nominated for a 2000 Tony award. Ehle won. "It put a lot of pressure on us, but it was fine. You know, awards are lovely to get, but I think it's the person with the best part who wins. That's what I told my mother anyway," she smiles.
Now she plans to stay in New York, even if she's still unsure whether she prefers it to Britain. "I don't know. I think I'm very happy that, having spent all my adult years in England, it's nice to be back here and getting to know America as an adult. There are things I have to catch up on, but it's nice to even it out."
Where Ehle goes from here is anybody's guess. She has no work lined up, says she has no preference for either film or theatre and, unusually for an actress, seems fatalistic about her career. She certainly isn't the type to head out to LA and push herself. "There's no game plan, there never has been, so it's whatever comes up that's interesting." If she's in it, then it will be.