Camomile Tears

"It is the mind which creates the world around us, and even though we stand side by side in the same meadow, my eyes will never see what is beheld by yours, my heart will never stir to the emotions with which yours is touched."

Jennifer Ehle played Elizabeth Bennet in the 1995 award-winning BBC TV adaption of Jane Austen’s Pride And Prejudice and launched a film career. The American-born star, 43, has a major role as a CIA officer in the thrilling action movie Zero Dark Thirty, which is the hottest tip for a Best Picture Oscar. She lives in America with writer husband Michael Ryan and children George, nine, and Talulah, three. For all undoubted success, she tells the Sun's Garth Pearce, there is still one particular thing she wishes she had known when she was 18. "I wish I’d not taken off all my clothes in my first television series, The Camomile Lawn," she admits. "When I took the job, I did not realise there would be so much nudity. But no one forced me to do it. I played the young Calypso (her English actress mother, Rosemary Harris, played the character as an older woman) and had some very full-on scenes. I went home one day and was physically sick."

The Camomile Lawn, based on the novel by Mary Wesley, draws a vivid picture of wartime London and Cornwall as seen through the eyes of five cousins. In the dizzying heat of August 1939, they have gathered at their aunt’s house for their annual ritual of a holiday. For most of them it is the last summer of their youth, with the heady exhilarations and freedoms of lost innocence, as well as the fears of the coming war. We then follow them over the years, as the novel unravels the stories of the cousins, their family and their friends, united by shared losses and lovers, by family ties and the absurd conditions imposed by war as their paths cross and recross: the rationing, imaginatively circumvented; the fallen houses; the parties; the new-found comforts of sex; the desperate humour of survival — all of it evoked with warmth, clarity and stunning wit.


Ehle says it never occurred to her that she was too young to deal with it all. "I thought I was so grown up, because I had lived on my own for years and years," she says. "I was an only child and comfortable with my own company. I attended 18 separate schools, because my parents (her father is American novelist John Ehle) moved between America, where I was born, and Britain. I went to a mixed boarding school at 15 in Michigan, USA, and only lived with my parents for a few weeks at a time, after that. I only got British citizenship the year we did Pride And Prejudice. I thought London would be a nicer city to be unemployed in than New York or Los Angeles."

And what about those long ago Colin Firth rumours? "He is a very nice guy and a very good actor," smiles Ehle. "We did have a relationship for about a year. But by the time Pride And Prejudice came out, we were not a couple any more. There was a silly photograph taken the first time we ever met. Photographers draped us around each other in the Blue Peter garden at the BBC. It was taken before the relationship started and used only after the relationship ended. But it didn’t upset me." At that time Ehle belives she was a different person both emotionally and physically. "One thing I noticed about working for five months non-stop wearing the dresses on Pride And Prejudice was that my body started to change shape," she says. "Everything was squeezed downwards, because of the corsets. It must have meant that in the early 1800s women looked very different, as they started wearing the things from the age of 17."

Just like any actress, Ehle has had good years and lean years since exploding on to our screens. "I cannot say that my time out of work came as any surprise but I always thought badly of myself when not working," she states. "I even went in to Waterstones a couple of years after I had done Pride And Prejudice to ask how to apply for a job there. They said I would have to send in my CV and I chickened out. One thing I did know at 18 was that work and unemployment sit side by side as an actress. It is just the way it is. But there was no way I could have known what it does to you. Spending too long navel-gazing, waiting for work, can eventually turn you funny. It did my head in."

She recalls doing a film, This Year’s Love, with her character saying: 'I am coming up to 30, getting life sorted out.' "I put myself in to that category, without a doubt," says Ehle. "I was 29 at the time and trying to get the balance right between work and life outside work. I hadn’t had a relationship for more than three years and I was out of the loop. What did I miss? I always thought it would have been great to have someone to hold the other end of the tape measure, as I was doing up a kitchen in a flat at the time."

When she met her husband, she believes she was in love on their first date. "I never dreamt about being a bride and cannot honestly say why getting married felt right," she says. "But I did want children. So much of my life with a family is NOT about work — and that is something which is impossible to predict at 18. I am even known as Jennifer Ryan, rather than Ehle, where we live. But for a film like Zero Dark Thirty, it’s fantastic to be involved. It is great to see a grown-up movie which does not patronise its audience. That’s a thrill that does not go away, whatever my age."