Born in Winston-Salem, North Carolina to English actress Rosemary Harris and American author John Ehle, Ehle made her stage debut as a toddler in a 1973 Broadway revival of A Streetcar Named Desire, in which her mother played Blanche Dubois. She spent her childhood between the UK and US, attending 18 different schools including the Interlochen Arts Academy. Her drama training was split between the North Carolina School of the Arts and the Central School of Speech and Drama in London.

In 1992, Peter Hall cast her in an adaptation of The Camomile Lawn, a novel by Mary Wesley, in which she and her mother played the same character at different ages. This story, produced by UK's Channel 4, was a five part mini-series about lives and loves of a family of cousins from 1939 to the present.

Her performance as Elizabeth Bennet in the 1995 BBC television adaptation of Jane Austen's classic Pride and Prejudice gained her a British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) award. After a stint with the Royal Shakespeare Company, she gained her first major feature film role in Paradise Road. She continued pursuing a career both on stage and screen, winning critical acclaim and a Best Performance by a Leading Actress Tony Award for her 2000 Broadway debut in Tom Stoppard's The Real Thing. Her mother was also nominated for the same award that year for Waiting in the Wings. After a hiatus, she returned to the stage in 2005 in The Philadelphia Story at the Old Vic opposite Kevin Spacey. The following year she played Lady Macbeth in Macbeth as part of the Shakespeare in the Park. She won her second Tony award for portraying three characters in Stoppard's The Coast of Utopia triptych, which ran from October 2006 until May 2007.

Her most recent films include Before the Rains, an Indian-US co-production directed by Santosh Sivan, and Pride and Glory with Edward Norton and Colin Farrell. In 2008 she was featured in a CBS telefilm, The Russell Girl.

Ehle played a character in István Szabó's movie Sunshine, and her mother Rosemary Harris played the older version of the character.

In August 2009, it was announced that Ehle would play the character of Catelyn Stark in the pilot of HBO's Game of Thrones, an adaptation of George R.R. Martin's A Song Of Ice And Fire fantasy book series, but on March 19, 2010, it was announced that she would be replaced by Irish actress Michelle Fairley.

In 2010, Ehle will be staring alongside John Lithgow in the production of MR. & MRS. FITCH presented by Second Stage Theatre. She will also play Myrtle Logue, wife of King George VI's speech therapist Lionel Logue, in The King's Speech. George VI is played by her Pride and Prejudice co-star, Colin Firth.

Ehle is married to the writer Michael Ryan and they have two children, George and Talulah. They currently reside in upstate New York.[citation needed]

Cheryl Campbell (1980) · Peggy Ashcroft (1981) · Judi Dench (1982) · Beryl Reid (1983) · Coral Browne (1984) · Peggy Ashcroft (1985) · Claire Bloom (1986) · Anna Massey (1987) · Emma Thompson (1988) · Thora Hird (1989) Diana Rigg (1990) · Geraldine McEwan (1991) · Helen Mirren (1992) · Helen Mirren (1993) · Helen Mirren (1994) · Juliet Aubrey (1995) · Jennifer Ehle (1996) · Gina McKee (1997) · Daniela Nardini (1998) · Thora Hird (1999)

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