Joy for Jennifer

An article from the Daily Mail Weekend Section,June 24, 2000
by Sarah Chalmers

Rosemary Harris congratulates her daughter 
Jennifer Ehle

When Pride and Prejudice star Jennifer Ehle won the prestigious Tony Award for Best Actress on Broadway, she reduced one fellow nominee to tears, her mother Rosemary Harris.

Here the veteran star tells Sarah Chalmers about the triumph - and trauma - of their big night.

Rosemary Harris and her daughter Jennifer Ehle laughed out loud when they were asked to move into the aisle seats at this month's Tony Awards where they became the first ever mother and daughter to compete against each other for the same prize at the New York ceremony. "They said all the nominees have to sit on the outside so it's easier for them to get out," Rosemary says now. "We thought, 'There's really no point; neither of us is going to win', but we didn't want to make a fuss, so we moved."

Of course, as we now know, there certainly was a point - but for the daughter rather than the mother. Jennifer, the beguiling star of The Camomile Lawn and Pride and Prejudice, was announced as Lead Actress In A Play for her role in Tom Stoppard's The Real Thing. Delighted, she leaned forward to hug her tearful mother and equally proud father - the American author John Ehle - before rushing to the stage in her new backless frock to collect the prestigious award.

"I wouldn't be here without my beautiful, beautiful, beautiful parents," she said as Rosemary wept tears of unabashed joy.
It was a rare public display of emotion for this stylish Anglo- American family. "When they announced Jennifer's name for the Tony Award," says Rosemary, "it was like being told you had won the Lottery.
It was a mixture of shock and joy and ecstasy and disbelief. The tears were pouring down my cheeks. I was just so thrilled to lose," she laughs.

The tears were pouring down my cheeks.
I was just so thrilled to lose.

Rosemary, who was nominated for her role in Noel Cowward's Waiting in the Wings, won the same award in 1966 for her part in The Lion in Winter. Back then, the awards were not televised and consisted of a small tea party at a New York hotel. She remembers that when she won "everybody in the room turned round to see who I was, because nobody had heard of me." She felt quite out of place, and has used the award as a paperweight ever since. "I am rather proud of it, though. The engraver obviously got carried away with all the Rs in my name and spelt Broadway Star with two Rs!"

One suspects that despite her distinguished career - she was once described as unrivalled in her portrayal of "the romantic female personality in its dauntless pursuit of love, honour, self-sacrifice and the wearing of gorgeous gowns" - the part she has found most fulfilling is that of mother. Certainly, Jennifer is besotted with her mother, to whom she bears an amazing resemblance. She has said: "I was an only, late child. I was spoiled rotten. The three of us are very close." Perhaps it is that closeness which made Jennifer such a late starter in love. When she did, finally, discover boys, she fell for two of her leading men in rapid succession.

First there was Toby Stephens, son of the actors Robert Stephens and Maggie Smith, on the set of the TV drama The Camomile Lawn, in which Jennifer famously appeared nude. "I got into boys very late," she said. "All through drama school I was uninterested. I didn't put out any signals for years." When she and Toby broke up they remained friends. Then came Colin Firth on the set of Jennifer's next triumph, Lizzie Bennet in Pride and Prejudice. In the end, it is said, Jennifer dumped Firth, though all she has said is, "Being on location and acting in a story opposite somebody is incredibly conducive to falling in love."

Her mother, like Jennifer, is one of those people who exude warmth. She has an elegant, serene beauty. We meet in her Manhattan apartment, which has a lived-in air, despite the fact it is not the actress's main home, but a base she uses whenever her stage work brings her to New York.

Rosemary speaks often and unselfconsciously of Jennifer. "I don't think she would mind me saying, but it was a stroke of luck she landed the part in The Real Thing. She did an interview in a British paper and said she hadn't worked in seven months, had been going to Starbucks, drinking coffee and going mad. When she told me afterwards what she had said, I said, "No, no, you should just say you are considering things and the right thing hasn't come along yet." But it turned out Tom Stoppard read the interview, called her agent up and said, "Why haven't we seen Jennifer Ehle?" She went along and read for him and got the part."

Rosemary says she has never given her daughter advice on acting, although they have appeared together twice - once as the younger and older version of Calypso in The Camomile Lawn, and again as Valerie, at different ages, in the recently released film Sunshine with Ralph Fiennes. On Tony night, all three members of the family got ready at Rosemary's apartment. It was a giddy affair, for which John dressed in a new tuxedo, Jennifer a new dress and Rosemary put on a favorite trouser suit.

Her favorite suit was covered in champagne.

Then just as the limousine arrived to take them to the ceremony, calamity struck. "I suddenly had this bright idea that I would take a bottle of champagne and we would drink it in the limousine." "So I opened the champagne and put it in a plastic bag. But the bag had a hole in it and the bottle went right through it and crashed on the corner of the table and spouted champagne all down my suit. I thought, 'What am I going to do? I have nothing else to wear.' So I rushed and got the ironing board out. It was such a farce, everyone was waiting in the car for me and I was covered in champagne. To my amazement, the iron dried it all out and there wasn't a mark, so I carried on downstairs with what remained of the champagne."

Rosemary was born in her grandmother's home in Suffolk, but spent the next six years in India. "It's very vivid in my mind," she recalls. "I had an ayah (nursemaid or governess) whom I adored. She taught me all my nursery rhymes in Hindustani, and I can still remember them today." She remembers her mother as "a perfect creature. She didn't work, I suppose she was part of the jazz age. But she was always busy - playing tennis or riding or shooting."

When the family returned to England and war broke out, the family moved to the Cornish village of Mylor, near the River Fal, and it was there, when Rosemary was only 14, that her mother died of pneumonia. "We didn't know she was terribly ill, she was just upstairs in the bedroom with flu for two days. When the doctor came to see her he ordered an ambulance to take her to Falmouth Hospital. We didn't go with her."

When day broke, she and her elder sister learned that her mother was critically ill so they hired a taxi to take them to the hospital, but it was already too late. "I didn't have the remotest idea that I would never see my mother again. It just never occurred to me."

The heartbreak of her mother's death is something Rosemary feels may be part of the reason Jennifer brings her such joy. She is careful not to be over-protective, but admits, "If someone says they are not feeling well, I don't disregard it." Rosemary returned to boarding school after her mother's death, a place where she was "miserably homesick. I felt my life had been blighted and that I would never be truly happy again."

When she left school she flirted with the idea of physiotherapy as a career, but settled instead for the theatre. Her father had written music and her mother loved to act, so as a youngster she was a talented mimic. After a spell at RADA, where she won the Gold Medal, she secured a role as an understudy in a Wilfred Pickles play called The Gay Dog at London's Piccadilly, where her sole task was to look after the dog and "make sure it peed in the interval and not on stage."

But in true fairytale fashion,
she auditioned for a role on Broadway in 1952 - and got the part. The young ingénue packed all her belongings into a trunk - including a sewing machine and some pots - and set sail aboard the Queen Mary.
The Broadway run was short-lived and
Rosemary was soon back in Britain, but her career was on its way (she was dubbed "the prettiest girl on Broadway" by one critic) and her love affair with America had begun.
By 1956 she decided she wanted to make America her home and stayed there at the end of another Broadway run. "I felt freer and less self-conscious in America and as a result I acted better."

Rosemary was dubbed "the prettiest girl on Broadway" by one critic.
Rosemary in Beau Brummell (1954)

Photo by Thomas Cox

In the late Sixties she met John Ehle, who would become her second husband. "My friend Bella Spewack, who wrote the script for the Cole Porter musical Kiss Me Kate, telephoned me one evening and said I had to come round, she had just met the man I was going to marry. She said it was like casting a play. He was in town for one day and ended up getting a wife."

The pair wed on the porch of John's North Carolina log-cabin in 1967, which they still own to this day. Two years later, Jennifer was born on what Rosemary calls "the happiest day of my life." With her own new family intact, she could begin to exorcise some of the ghosts of her past. Rosemary's father had died when she was in her early 20s at a time when their relationship was strained because of his repeated infidelities during the war. It was a betrayal the young Rosemary, who adored her mother, could not forgive. When her father remarried four years after her mother's death, Rosemary continued to live with her grandmother.

"I think if he had lived we would have become friends, but at the time I felt he had let my mother down." It is some comfort to Rosemary that her father was aware of her success as an actress, and immensely proud of her. "In his wallet he used to carry a clipping about my award at RADA."

When Jennifer was 14, during one of family's many visits to England, when Rosemary was filming Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse for the BBC, she replaced the saddest memory of all with a gloriously happy one. "Jennifer was the age I was when I lost my mother and I took her to see the house we had lived in at the time. It had a For Sale sign in the garden, and I took some lovely pictures of her walking round the garden and sitting on the same steps I had sat on as a girl. It was very moving to go back with my husband and daughter in happy times."

Rosemary with her daughter, Jennifer

Old Times

An article from the 1971 Old Times Souvenir Program by Harold Pinter. 
Photos by Sy Friedman/Zodiac and edited by Seymour Krawitz

Miss Harris was born in Suffolk , England , but spent her childhood in India and Kashmir . The late Moss Hart brought her to Broadway in his play and production of The Climate of Eden . After starring in The Seven Year Itch in London , she joined the Bristol Old Vic, and subsequently the London Old Vic playing Desdemona opposite Richard Burton’s Othello and Cressida in the late Sir TyroneGuthrie’s production of Troilus and Cressida.This production toured the United States and then Miss Harris appeared in Interlock and The Disenchanted on Broadway. She joined Group 20’s Theatre under the Stars at Wellesley , Mass. playing Peter Pan and thinks she may be the only Peter Pan to have flown out of doors. 

 Back on Broadway she appeared in Laurence Olivier’s production of The Tumbler, which later led to her joining his company at Chichester , England , and also the National Theatre Company of Great Britain , playing Ophelia in the inaugural production of Hamlet in 1964 and hyena in Uncle Vanya. 
Four years ago (this was written in 1971), Miss Harris married novelist John Ehle and they now have a baby daughter Jennifer. Just after she was married, Miss Harris starred in the London production of Plaza Suite and won the London Evening Standard Drama Award for her performance. Her last engagement in the United States prior to Old Times was in Los Angeles when she starred with Jack Lemmon in the Idiot‘s Delight revival. 

A Conversation With Rosemary Harris

by Matt Wolf

Rosemary Harris starring in Women of Troy at the National.  London Theatre News, 1995

On Broadway last season in An Inspector Calls, she was the Birling family matriarch, whose self-deception crumbled as dramatically as the Yorkshire jewel box of a house in which she lived. Now, . . . she is commanding the vast Olivier stage at the Royal National Theatre as Hecuba in Euripides' Women of Troy, providing the play's grief-stricken heart. Add to that her Oscar-nominated performance as T. S. Eliot's mother-in-law in Tom and Viv, and Rosemary Harris is in her prime: a seasoned pro who seems to take more risks the older she gets.

 "I don't think I am afraid now. It's like growing gills; I think I've grown gills for the stage," said Harris, a slender, attractive woman who looks younger than her 60-odd years. In an interview in the Chelsea flat she bought last year, Harris added, "I don't have anything to lose now, so it doesn't really matter, taking risks. That's why I was brave enough to do Women of Troy, because everyone said, 'Oh, a Greek play in the Olivier Theatre,' and I thought, 'Well, why not?' I could have gone on safely playing in An Inspector Calls but I think one has to be brave."

 The actress ranges widely in her choice of parts, shifting easily between London and New York , between American and British plays. On Broadway in the early 1980s, she received three successive Tony nominations for Heartbreak House, Pack of Lies, and Hay Fever. Then, with daughter Jennifer (now 24) enrolled in drama school in London , she came to the West End to play M'Lynn - the Sally FIeld role - in Steel Magnolias.

 Other memorable American mothers followed in Jane Bowles's In the Summer House, and, of course, in Lost in Yonkers, for which she was nominated for an Olivier Award. So versatile is she that some local press failed to include Harris in round-ups of British Oscar nominees, assuming - because her home base remains Winston-Salem , North Carolina , where husband John Ehle lives and writes - that she must be an elegantly accented American.

 She takes the back-and-forth nature of her life in stride. "It seems perfectly normal to me because I've done it so long and so often," Harris said. "I know it must seem a long way to other people, but nowadays you just close your eyes and you're there; it's like going up to Manchester or Birmingham ."

 Tom and Viv revived a movie career that has long been subordinated to theatre work, and Harris hopes to increase her film exposure. "If I could go on playing Nora and the young Shakespearean heroines, I wouldn't perhaps think about films," she said, citing The Cherry Orchard, Ghosts. and Shakespeare's Henry VIII as plays she would like to do. "Maybe it's nice now to think one can expand oneself a bit. If some nice film roles came along, this would be the time to do them."
  

Rosemary Harris talks with Gerard Rymond

London Theatre News, November 1992

Rosemary Harris's smile is like a warm embrace. Her head slightly inclined, her face lights up radiating grace and compassion. But you won't see that smile in Lost in Yonkers until the curtain call.

 In the new Neil Simon play, currently at the Strand Theatre, Harris plays Grandma Kurnitz, a formidable German Jewish matriarch who terrorizes the two grandsons left temporarily in her care. Having suffered the horrors of war, Grandma has turned herself into a monster in order to survive.

 "I personally think Grandma is capable of loving but doesn't know how to," says Harris, describing the role that she also played for six months on Broadway. Her performance is quite different from that of Irene Worth, who created the part. She infuses the mean old grandmother with a subterranean current of warmth that is quintessential Rosemary Harris.

 In her 40-year stage career, Harris has performed on both sides of the Atlantic, but Lost in Yonkers marks the first time she re-creates in England a role she played in America . Ironically, for someone so English in both looks and temperament, she has spent the past 36 years of her career and her life primarily in the United States . In fact, she got her first break as an actress in New York .

 Moss Hart's Climate of Eden opened on Broadway in 1952 and lasted only two weeks, but it won for the 22 year-old Harris the Theater World award for most promising actress of the year. Fourteen years later she would fulfill that promise, winning Broadway's highest accolade, the Tony, for her performance in The Lion in Winter. After The Climate of Eden she returned to London for The Seven-Year Itch, beginning a career-long trend of performing American plays in London and British plays in New York .

In 1955 Harris joined the London Old Vic Company, proving she had a flair for Shakespeare and the classics. According to Sir Peter Hall, who has directed Harris onstage and in television, her Ophelia and her Cressida at the Old Vic were marked by a self-deprecating wit. "There is a twinkle at the back of her eyes that makes her suffering all the more potent."

 After an American tour of Troilus and Cressida in 1957, Harris decided to stay in the United States , saying she didn't want to spend the rest of her life playing classical roles in England . Nevertheless, at Laurance Olivier's invitation, she returned to England to give a memorable performance in Olivier's celebrated production of Uncle Vanya with Michael Redgrave in 1963. When Olivier became head of the National Theatre a year later, Harris repeated the role and also played Ophelia to Peter O'Toole's Hamlet in the National's inaugural season.

 Despite her success at the National, Harris returned to America in 1965. She was hoping to mend her failing marriage to the American actor/director Ellis Rabb. She and Rabb were married in 1959 and formed the Association of Producing Artists soon after their wedding. APA toured the United States extensively, earning a reputation for being one of the finest repertory companies in the country. Rabb and she divorced in 1967 but that same year, Harris married John Ehle, a novelist. She now lives in Winston Salem, North Carolina, with Ehle; they have one daughter, Jennifer, also an actress.

 Does she regret not staying on at the National in the sixties to continue in the British classical actress tradition? Harris beams her radiant smile and says her daughter and her husband, John, are ample compensation, adding, "I knew I didn't want to sit with only a book of yellowing press cuttings." But Harris confesses she is "sick for not doing Shakespeare," and would be glad to play "any one of the old hags!"

 Once her stint in Lost in Yonkers is completed, Harris is looking forward to working again soon. She searches for the right metaphor to describe her feelings about acting, and pauses. Then she smiles. "Doing a play is like being at a wonderful party. I don't know how many more invitations I will get, but I am a party girl and I really enjoy a good party!"

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