Welcome to Always Great, an Awards Insider column in which we speak with Hollywood’s greatest undersung actors in career-spanning conversations. In this entry, Jennifer Ehle reflects on her two juicy roles in Dead Ringers and 1923, and looks back at her memorable TV roles and Tony-winning stage work.

What do a ruthless Irish Catholic nun and a manipulative billionaire investor have in common? The talented Jennifer Ehle.

The two-time Tony winner is having a banner year on TV, with a pair of deliciously terrifying roles that display the veteran actor’s incredible range. In Dead Ringers, Amazon’s dark series starring Rachel Weisz as twin gynecologists, Ehle plays Rebecca, a billionaire investor who invites the twins to her estate for a twisted weekend of parties and mind games. And in Paramount’s 1923, she plays Sister Mary, a nun who teaches at a Catholic boarding school for Native Americans, often tormenting her students.

If you don’t recognize Ehle in both roles, that’s maybe to be expected at this point. Throughout her career, Ehle has taken on a myriad of roles, each one different from the one before it. “I think most actors can play a wide range of characters,” she tells Vanity Fair. “It’s just there isn’t always a wide range of characters written.”

Whether it’s on the stage, such as in her Tony-winning work in The Real Thing and The Coast of Utopia; on the big screen in Contagion, Zero Dark Thirty, or She Said; or on television with her breakout role in the BBC miniseries Pride and Prejudice, Ehle’s chameleonic work, big or small, is always captivating. “I keep being able to go away and then come back with a new point of entry,” says Ehle, who walked Vanity Fair through the many transformative moments of her career. “I feel very grateful for that because I get to keep exploring things from different angles, which is fun.”

The lore goes that Ehle, who was born in North Carolina to English actor Rosemary Harris and American author John Ehle, landed her very first role on Broadway when she was just a toddler. But Ehle doesn’t see it that way. Her mother was starring as Blanche DuBois in the 1973 Broadway revival of A Streetcar Named Desire, and her mother’s first husband, Ellis Rabb, was directing the show. Three of the actors had young children, and so Rabb decided that the kids would make a small appearance when Blanche references a birthday party going by. “So for a couple of matinees, he had us walk across the back of the stage,” she says. “That was all. I don’t know if the audience even saw us.”

Growing up, Ehle says she was often asked if she wanted to be a writer like her father or an actor like her mother. “It always made me very anxious because I felt like I would hurt their feelings if I chose one over the other,” she says. She intended to major in both creative writing and acting when she enrolled in the Interlochen Arts Academy in Michigan, but forced to choose, she opted for acting. Though she got into Juilliard, Ehle chose to continue her studies at London’s Central School of Speech and Drama. “I was intimidated by the idea of training in America, and I couldn’t quite see where I would fit in,” she says. “I didn’ think that I would make a living doing movies.” 

Being in London allowed her to pursue a stage career, but she was concerned about being pigeonholed because she was seen as an American. “I saw that often the Americans who’d stayed were playing Americans. And at the time, and we’re talking 1990, England was very xenophobic,” she says. “I found it kind of exhausting being a Yank in London.”

Over the summer between her second and third year, while Ehle was performing Crimes of the Heart at a theater in North Carolina, she decided she would practice every day in order to adopt an English accent before she returned to school. It was yet another transformation for Ehle. “I thought, Well, the only way I’m going to get to play British people is if I walk in the room with a British accent,” she says. “And then I went back for my third year with a British accent.”

It might have done the trick. Ehle ended up leaving school early when she was cast as Calypso in the British TV show The Camomile Lawn, an adaptation of the 1984 book of the same name. “I’d just turned 21 when I was cast,” she says. “Calypso was very confident and very sexual, and she wanted to marry a rich man.” Camomile Lawn director Peter Hall then cast her in his production of Tartuffe on the West End. It would be the beginning of her fruitful stage career, starring in Richard III and The Relapse at the Royal Shakespeare Company and Summerfolk at the National Theatre in the 1990s.

Ehle’s breakout role onscreen came in 1995 when she played Elizabeth Bennet in the six-episode BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice. The beloved series, in which she starred opposite Colin Firth, was met with critical acclaim and earned Ehle a BAFTA and breakout star status. “I think it was extremely significant. Of course, I didn’t know that at the time,” says Ehle, who reveals that she was first offered the role of Jane Bennet but turned it down. “I would be so envious of the person playing Lizzie.”

In 2000, Ehle won the Tony award for best actress in a play for starring in The Real Thing in her Broadway debut. Ehle says she fell in love with the Tom Stoppard play when she saw the original Broadway run starring Jeremy Irons and Glenn Close when she was just 14 years old. “I was obsessed with the play. I could do whole scenes from it and would. I just loved the rhythm of it,” she says. In the 2000 Broadway revival, Ehle starred as activist and actor Annie, a role she says she found “very liberating. I felt very free. And it was absolute heaven, honestly.” 

Ehle would go on to win another Tony award in 2007 for The Coast of Utopia, another Tom Stoppard work made up of a trilogy of plays telling an epic story based on real-life pre-revolutionary Russian intellectuals that also starred Billy Crudup and Ethan Hawke. “I love doing Stoppard. I love his women,” she says. “I hope I will have more in my future at some point.” Ehle played three different characters throughout the three three-hour plays. “It was just the most fun you could possibly have as an actor,” she says. Ehle’s prolific stage work has continued since, appearing in Oslo in 2017 and Hamlet in 2022. “It’s my drug of choice,” she says. “When it’s good, there’s nothing like it. When it doesn’t work, it’s equally excruciating.”

Onscreen, Ehle often appears as characters with heavy responsibilities, including Dr. Ally Hextal in Steven Soderbergh’s 2011 pandemic thriller Contagion. “I love science. So to be able to be given a chance to pretend to be somebody who knows as much about it as Ally was a real treat,” she says. Or take her role as the CIA agent Jessica in Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty. “I love Kathryn,” says Ehle. “She’s one of my best friends, and I have so much respect for her. I think she’s an extraordinary storyteller.”

Ehle went through yet another transformation in the past few years, she says. It began with the 2019 indie film Saint Maud, in which she played a former dancer who is dying of cancer. The unsettling horror movie centers on a young caretaker (Morfydd Clark) who comes to take care of Ehle’s hard-partying, dying character. “That character was the beginning of where I was like, Oh, I can see where I could have a career as a middle-aged actor now,” says Ehle. “I thought, Oh, good. I think I’m making the transition, and I love it. I do think that people are writing really cool older women now. It’s a good time for us.”

Indeed, it’s been a rich few years for Ehle, who is now 53. She recently appeared in the Harvey Weinstein scandal movie She Said as Laura Madden, the survivor who helped bring down the movie mogul. “That meant a lot to me, to be trusted with portraying Laura Madden,” she says. “I don’t know, I’m just really glad I keep getting work.”

Ehle says that last line humbly, but the work she’s been doing now is so rich and memorable, anyone would be lucky to have her in their project. She’s a scene-stealer in Dead Ringers as the billionaire investor, pulling inspiration from Ayn Rand and her Atlas Shrugged character John Galt. “She’s just at that very pinnacle, where there are just a tiny, tiny, little handful of people who she would consider her equals, if she would consider anybody her equal,” she says. “It was really fun to try to get in that headspace and think of what it would be like.” 

In 1923, Ehle’s Sister Mary is a terrifying character who is physically abusive toward her students. “She has been sort of indoctrinated and raised with this intense philosophy and worldview,” says Ehle. “There doesn’t seem to be any apparent benefit to her living that way or believing those things. So I think you certainly couldn’t say she’s a happy person.”

In their own ways, both of Ehle’s characters exist to torment other characters on the shows. They also allow Ehle to show off her daring choices as an actor in a way that, yes, harkens back to her most comfortable home, the stage. “The writing in both of them is quite extraordinary and also, in very different ways, quite theatrical,” she says. “It’s fun to be engaged on that level. It means you can go big.”