Jennifer Ehle
Jennifer Ehle is an actor, born 1969.
Jennifer Ehle played Elizabeth Bennet in the 1995 BBC Pride and Prejudice at 25, in what is still the adaptation every other one gets measured against, and it won her a BAFTA. What she did next is the unusual part: rather than converting that into a film career, she went to the theatre and largely stayed there, collecting two Tony Awards along the way for Tom Stoppard plays.
The screen work since has been a long sequence of small, exact parts, and she is among the best in the business at them. The vaccine researcher in Contagion who runs the crucial trial the fastest way available to her. The CIA officer in Zero Dark Thirty chasing a lead the agency has half given up on. Myrtle Logue in The King's Speech, the therapist's wife, who has one scene and walks off with it. She is very good at intelligence: her characters are usually the person in the room who has already done the reading.
Her filmography also contains three Fifty Shades films in which she plays a mother and is given nothing whatsoever, and the contrast is worth stating plainly, because it says more about what gets financed than about her. The better recent work is elsewhere: Saint Maud, A Quiet Passion, She Said, Sister Mary in 1923. She works constantly and quietly, and almost nobody could name her from a photograph.
Movies (42)
- Fifty Shades Freed (2018)
- Fifty Shades of Grey (2015)
- Fifty Shades Darker (2017)
- The King's Speech (2010)
- Contagion (2011)
- RoboCop (2014)
- Zero Dark Thirty (2012)
- The Adjustment Bureau (2011)
- Our Hero, Balthazar (2026)
- A Little Chaos (2015)
- The Ides of March (2011)
- I Kill Giants (2017)
- Detroit (2017)
- Wilde (1997)
- She Said (2022)
- The Miseducation of Cameron Post (2018)
- Saint Maud (2020)
- The Fundamentals of Caring (2016)
- Vox Lux (2018)
- Spooks: The Greater Good (2015)
- Pride and Glory (2008)
- The Professor and the Madman (2019)
- John and the Hole (2021)
- The Forger (2014)
- Possession (2002)
- Monster (2021)
- Sunshine (1999)
- The Greatest (2009)
- Take Point (2018)
- The Wolf Hour (2019)
TV (10)
Where to start with Jennifer Ehle
Pride and Prejudice runs six hours and is still the fastest recommendation to make: her Elizabeth is funnier and more impatient than the character usually gets played, and the whole thing rests on what she does with her eyes across a room.
The modern showcase is Saint Maud, a small British horror film about a hospice nurse and her patient, in which Ehle plays a former dancer with mockery, appetite and no interest in being anybody's redemption story. It is the most alive she has been on film.
Then the supporting run, which becomes a real pleasure once you start noticing her. Contagion hands her the film's most quietly heroic act. Zero Dark Thirty and The King's Speech are one-scene demonstrations of how much can be done with very little. She Said and A Quiet Passion are the recent ones worth your time, and Possession is the romantic curiosity.
The costume drama that defined her
Elizabeth Bennet in 1995 is still the version people picture, and the period work around it is uniformly better than its reputation. A Quiet Passion casts her opposite Cynthia Nixon's Emily Dickinson and is the most interesting of them.
The serious American supporting parts
For fifteen years she has been the person these films cast when a scene needs someone competent and quietly furious: a CIA analyst, a vaccine researcher, a campaign fixer, a newspaper editor. Contagion is the one everybody rewatched in 2020.
Fifty Shades and the genre work
She plays Anastasia's mother across all three Fifty Shades films, which paid for a great deal of theatre. Saint Maud is the far more interesting genre credit, a small British horror film in which she is barely recognisable.