I arrive to meet Ehle as her shoot for Stella is finishing, in a sunny studio in a not-quite-gentrified part of Brooklyn, New York. The street is not somewhere one would wish to linger after dark, and downstairs is a factory making dog boots, but the un-actressy Ehle, 45, is taking it all in her stride (no pun intended).  Between shots she chats happily, telling me that she began adopting a British accent aged 20, while studying at London’s Central School of Speech and Drama. “I hated all the questions about how long I was staying and when I was ‘going back’,” she says.  “I was young and easily made self-conscious, I suppose. And I wanted to work in England, to play British people in Britain.”  We debate whether one is exactly the same person in different accents and languages. “There were a few days when I was having trouble finding words to express feelings of enthusiasm,” she says, laughing. “But when I discovered ‘brilliant’, I was fine.”  But when we sit down and I switch on my recorder, the atmosphere changes: suddenly she seems uncomfortable, answering questions with a diffident “I don’t know” and fixing her eyes on the floor for long periods. She relaxes a little, eventually, and later apologises for being “rusty” – she rarely gives interviews.  In the 1995 BBC series Pride and Prejudice with Colin Firth (REX)  Ehle is based in upstate New York with her husband, the writer Michael Scott Ryan, and their son, 12, and daughter, six. Off-camera she speaks in a soft mid-Atlantic accent, the result of a childhood spent in New York, North Carolina and London as her father, the American author John Ehle, and mother, the British actress Rosemary Harris, moved between the countries.  • Jane Austen’s Names: Riddles, Persons, Places by Margaret Doody, review: 'exuberant'  On-camera, as the icy Geraldine Maltby in Spooks – with Peter Firth as the head of counter-terrorism, Harry Pearce, and Kit Harington (Game of Thrones’s Jon Snow) as his protégé – her accent is cut-glass. “I can’t really be more British – I’m the deputy director of MI5,” she says, laughing.  She missed the television series the first time around. “So I began watching it to catch up and became addicted. It’s so compelling, and I became fascinated by Nicola Walker [who played Ruth Evershed, a senior analyst].” But Ehle had done a lot of her Spooks homework four years earlier, in preparation for Zero Dark Thirty, reading widely on international espionage to play a character she says was “a composite” of real-life spies.  One can probably assume Ehle is a fan of the espionage genre. “Yes – you’re watching incredibly smart people who are dealing with information coming at them really fast and making decisions in high-stakes situations.” Did she speak directly to any former spooks? “Um, I don’t know what I can say. These non-disclosure things, how long do they last? Do they have an expiration date?” She giggles a little nervously.  Ehle in next month’s Spooks: The Greater Good (GETTY)  Before Spooks is released she can be seen in A Little Chaos, a period piece directed by Alan Rickman (who also stars as Louis XIV) about the construction of the Palace of Versailles, with Kate Winslet and Matthias Schoenaerts. Ehle plays Madame de Montespan. “I’m Louis XIV’s mistress who’s getting the boot and being nudged out,” she tells me.  Does it take a lot to get her into a corset these days? “What, a lot of people?” she jokes. I explain that I wondered if she’d avoided costume drama so as not to be typecast. “Not at all. I don’t feel I’ve got to avoid anything. Elizabeth Bennet is one of the greatest protagonists of any story around. I can’t imagine wanting to avoid characters like her. And anyway, I always thought of Pride and Prejudice as more of a romantic comedy than a period drama. It just happens that they were the clothes people wore when it was written.”  Tentatively I broach the fact that, after the phenomenal success of Pride and Prejudice, one might have expected a steeper, or more consistent, career trajectory. “I’ve never felt like there was a lack… I’ve only ever felt really fortunate that I seem to be able to go away, to be able to recede and come forward.” She didn’t act at all between 2001 and 2004. “And there have been several years in which jobs were chosen because of the small number of days they would require me to go away.  • Spooks: The Greater Good review  “I’m not terribly ambitious,” she says, eventually. “I’m not a pusher. I love acting and I feel incredibly fortunate that I do something I love and support my family, but I don’t think I would be happy trading what I have for a bigger career.”  When she was growing up, Ehle’s parents located themselves according to Harris’s work (“Dad would pick up his typewriter and me, and off we’d go”). “I saw so little nine-to-five,” she recalls. “I loved the freedom and how fulfilled my mother was by her work. It was a lovely childhood.  “I liked being an only child, too,” she adds. “Though I don’t feel like I am one completely because my oldest friend, Emily, and I were together a lot, and she even lived with us for six months at one point. I think I would miss it if I didn’t have her to share those memories with.”  Ehle with her mother, the actress Rosemary Harris, 1973 (RON GALLELA COLLECTION/GETTY)  Ehle attended schools in America and Britain, though not as many as 18, as has been quoted before. “I think that might have been the total number of times I moved between educational institutions. I did go to the same school in Winston-Salem in North Carolina three times, and the same school in New York twice. But we always had a base – my parents still live in the house in North Carolina that they lived in when I was born.”  She aspired to be a writer, like her father. “But at 15 I ended up as a theatre major at boarding school. I don’t know how that happened as I’d never acted before. Then I played Amanda in The Glass Menagerie and loved it.”  She applied to drama schools in America and Britain, and was accepted at both New York’s Juilliard and London’s Central School of Speech and Drama, but chose to come to the UK. “I don’t know why, but I was a little intimidated by the idea of the profession in America,” she says. “And I wanted a classical training, and wanted to go to England.”  • Fifty Shades' Dakota Johnson: on sex scenes and her famous parents  Straight after drama school, in 1991, she made her West End debut in Peter Hall’s production of Tartuffe. She was then cast in her breakthrough role, as the mercenary Calypso in Channel 4’s The Camomile Lawn, dubbed “The Camomile Porn” by tabloids thanks to its levels of nudity and sex, particularly between Ehle and Toby Stephens (with whom she had a relationship).  Ehle has previously said that in retrospect she was too young to handle the role, and was physically sick after filming some scenes. “But it was people’s reactions that really astonished me and sent me scurrying to a place of, ‘Oh gosh, yes, wasn’t that shocking? Maybe I shouldn’t have done it,’” she says today. “It was a shock the first time I opened a newspaper and there was a picture of me topless in it. I hadn’t expected it to be a big deal. At 21, it felt like a lot of attention.”  Her mother, who played the older incarnation of Calypso, took a different attitude. “She was incredibly cool about it. She said, ‘How great to be a symbol of something as wonderful as sex.’” Ehle smiles. “Not that she was saying I was a sex symbol,” she adds, hastily. But to many people she was – and is. “In her book [How To Be a Woman], Caitlin Moran said my nipples were ‘mouse-nose pink’,” she says, blushing slightly. “That’s a lovely description.”  Ehle's breakthrough role in The Camomile Lawn, 1992 (REX)  By the time Pride and Prejudice was broadcast, in 1995, to yet bigger noise, Ehle was sequestered in Stratford-upon-Avon, spending a year with the Royal Shakespeare Company. “So I wasn’t really aware of all the fuss.” Though they were no longer together when the series aired, there was a frenzy over her brief off-screen relationship with Firth.  The pair were reunited for The King’s Speech in 2010 (Ehle played Myrtle Logue, the wife of King George’s speech therapist, Lionel). Had she and Firth kept in touch? “No,” she says briskly. “I’m not in touch with anyone from Pride and Prejudice. We filmed it 21 years ago.”  • The King's Speech: the real story  Taking The Real Thing to Broadway – after a run at the Donmar Warehouse – brought Ehle back to America in 2000, where she soon met her husband and was prompted to take some time off from her career. “I wanted to pay attention to that,” she says of their relationship. “There isn’t anything more important than that.” They have been married for 14 years.  But it is something she is committed to keeping private. When I ask more about Ryan, I am told, politely but firmly, “I don’t want to talk about my family any more.” Her children have experienced an upbringing more geographically stable than her own – the family lives on 13 rural acres a couple of hours north of New York City, where Ehle is known primarily by her married name, Jennifer Ryan. She plays board games and keeps chickens. “I think at heart I’m a country person.”  She has complained in the past about the dearth of decent acting roles for women. “But I think there’s a big change happening now,” she says, becoming animated. “And it’s really changing for middle-aged women.” She credits the increase in complex female leading roles on television, but also the rising number of prominent female directors, such as Kathryn Bigelow and Sam Taylor-Johnson.  In A Little Chaos, also released this year (REX)  Working with the latter was her sole motivation for taking on the role in Fifty Shades of Grey. “I only spent four days on set, but Sam was absolutely wonderful to work with, and I hope I do it again.” Ehle is signed up for the second and third instalments of the trilogy, but, amid rumours of battles over creative direction with the books’ author, EL James, the extent of Taylor-Johnson’s further involvement is not yet clear.  Ehle’s mother is a fine example of career longevity: Harris, 87, was performing on stage as recently as last year. Ehle’s father, 89, has just had his 1964 novel The Land Breakers reprinted to acclaim. “My kids have no idea about how 80-year-olds generally behave, because they only know my parents,” she says, smiling.  Harris and Ehle have played the same character at different ages, and in 2000 became the first mother and daughter to be nominated for a Tony for best actress in a play in the same year (Harris for Waiting In the Wings), but they have never acted together. “We would love to do something opposite each other.”  Now her children are a little older, Ehle admits to feeling curious about what professional opportunities might be out there again. “I’d like to do another play next. It doesn’t have to be on Broadway, but I miss that feeling of being on stage with amazing actors and telling a story.”  She has an audition later today, and unlike most actors, she says she relishes the process. “I love just being someone else for 20 minutes.” She grins. “Then I’ll go back to the country, the board games and the school run.” Maybe white-hot ambition isn’t all it’s cracked to be.  Spooks: The Greater Good is out 8 May
After finding fame as Lizzie Bennet, the Anglo-American actress Jennifer Ehle   ducked out of the spotlight. But with roles in Spooks and A Little Chaos,   her cover is blown