The daughter of English actress Rosemary Harris and American writer John Ehle, Jennifer Ehle is perhaps best known for her BAFTA Award-winning starring role in the 1995 BBC series Pride and Prejudice. The actress was just a toddler when she made her stage debut in a minor role in the Broadway revival of A Streetcar Named Desire in 1973, which featured her mother in the lead role. Subsequently, after extensive formal training in theatre, she made her West End debut in 1991 with the play Tartuffe. An year later, Ehle made her television debut with the drama series The Camomile Lawn.

Since her feature film debut in the musical drama Backbeat (1994), Ehle has appeared in over thirty-five movies, notable among which are the biographical drama Wilde (1997), the historical drama Sunshine (1999), The King's Speech (2010), The Ides of March (2011) and the political action-thriller Zero Dark Thirty (2012). While her work in Wilde earned her a BAFTA Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress, Ehle won the Satellite Award for Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role for her performance in Sunshine.

Ehle is also a seasoned theatre artist, and has won multiple Tony Awards for her roles in productions like The Real Thing (2000) and The Cost of Utopia (2007). Other significant feature film credits include Contagion (2011), the biographical drama A Quiet Passion (2016), Detroit (2017) and the fantasy thriller I Kill Giants (018).