Jennifer Ehle

Jennifer Ehle is an American and British actress born on December 29, 1969, in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, to English actress Rosemary Harris and American author John Ehle. Her ancestry includes Romanian on her mother's side and German and English on her father's side. She spent her childhood between the United Kingdom and the United States, attending Interlochen Arts Academy and being raised primarily in Asheville, North Carolina. Her formal training was divided between the North Carolina School of the Arts and the Central School of Speech and Drama in London.

Ehle's professional debut came in the 1992 British television adaptation of Mary Wesley's The Camomile Lawn, in which she and her mother both portrayed the same character at different ages. The production's director, Peter Hall, subsequently cast her as Elmire in his 1991 staging of Tartuffe, a role that earned her second prize at the Ian Charleson Awards. Her most prominent early credit came in 1995, when she played Elizabeth Bennet opposite Colin Firth in the BBC adaptation of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, a performance for which she received the British Academy Television Award for Best Actress. That same year she joined the Royal Shakespeare Company, and her first major feature film role followed in Paradise Road in 1997, with supporting appearances in Wilde and Sunshine rounding out the decade.

Ehle made her Broadway debut in 2000 as Annie in Tom Stoppard's The Real Thing, winning the Tony Award for Best Performance by a Leading Actress in a Play and earning a Laurence Olivier Award nomination for Best Actress. The following year she returned to Broadway in a revival of Noël Coward's Design for Living, appearing alongside Dominic West and Alan Cumming. Between Broadway engagements, she performed in London in The Philadelphia Story at the Old Vic opposite Kevin Spacey in 2005, and played Lady Macbeth opposite Liev Schreiber in a Shakespeare in the Park production of Macbeth.

Ehle reunited with Stoppard for The Coast of Utopia, a triptych that ran on Broadway from October 2006 through May 2007. She portrayed three characters across the trilogy's first two parts, Voyage and Shipwreck, performing alongside Billy Crudup, Martha Plimpton, and Ethan Hawke. The role earned her a second Tony Award, this time for Best Featured Actress in a Play. In 2017, Ehle appeared on Broadway in J.T. Rogers's Oslo, which won the Tony Award for Best Play, and she received a Tony nomination for Best Actress in a Play for her performance.

Her screen work spans a wide range of film and television projects. Notable film credits include The King's Speech opposite Colin Firth in 2010, Steven Soderbergh's Contagion in 2011, Kathryn Bigelow's Zero Dark Thirty in 2012, and Ira Sachs's Little Men in 2016. She appeared in the Fifty Shades franchise across three installments between 2015 and 2018, and received strong notices for her portrayal of Laura Madden in the 2022 investigative drama She Said. On television, she played Ambassador Barbara Bodine in the Hulu limited series The Looming Tower and portrayed Patrice Comey, wife of former FBI Director James Comey, opposite Jeff Daniels in the Showtime miniseries The Comey Rule. Additional television credits include NBC's The Blacklist, the CBS legal drama The Good Fight, the Apple TV+ series Suspicion, and the Paramount+ western series 1923. In 2023, she starred as Rebecca Parker in the Amazon Prime thriller miniseries Dead Ringers, which received a Peabody Award.

Ehle also returned to the stage in 2022, stepping in as a last-minute replacement to play Gertrude in a Park Avenue Armory production of Hamlet in New York. She was married to writer Michael Ryan from 2001 to 2025, and they have two children together.