Actress Jennifer Ehle

Jennifer Ehle is a woman of two nationalities, having been born a British mother and an American father.  Her parents are, in fact, actress Rosemary Harris and novelist John Ehle.

She came into her own as an actress early in her career, when, in 1995, she appeared as Elizabeth Bennet in a BBC 1995 adaptation of Jane Austen's novel Pride and Prejudice, which also starred Colin Firth.

Ms. Ehle's best-known roles since then have been on the West End and Broadway, signifying her dual nationality and her comfort on the stage on both sides of the Atlantic.  Her West End roles include Orgon's wife in a 1991 production of Molière's Tartuffe,as well as Calypso in a 1992 production of The Camomile Lawn.  On Broadway, she played Annie in a 2000 production of Tom Stoppard's The Real Thing, a play that toys with what is reality and what is not, and she won a Tony for Best Actress in a Play for it; she'd already played the role in London. She dazzled New York audiences again the following year in a revival of Noël Coward's Design for Living.  She later played Lady Macbeth in Macbeth, in a 2006 Shakespeare In the Park production in New York's Central Park.

None of this means that Jennifer Ehle turned her back on the movies.  Far from it; she's appeared in many films, her cinematic credits to numerous to list here.  Her best-known roles include as the wife of King George VI's speech therapist in The King's Speech from 2010 and as a CIA analyst in Kathryn Bigelow's 2012 film Zero Dark Thirty.  More recently, Ms. Ehle played Carla Wilks in the risqué Fifty Shades of Grey (2015) and as Emily Dickinson's sister in A Quiet Passion (2016), a biodrama about the famous poet.

Jennifer Ehle will be fifty later this year, but she shows no sign of slowing down.

Fun fact: She played Cynthia Powell - John Lennon's first wife - in BackBeat, a 1994 movie about the Beatles' beginnings in Hamburg and John Lennon's association with original Beatles bassist Stu Sutcliffe in particular.