A Quote by Jennifer Ehle
There's never been a game plan, and I suppose I've had an uneasy relationship with my ambition. Someone who had been in my year at drama school once said to me that I was terrifyingly ambitious back then. Which was not at all what I felt at the time - I felt paralysed with shyness, though that evaporated.
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I was never in a school situation where someone said, This is the way a photograph is supposed to look. I was completely open to cut them up, or do anything like that. I think if I had been in touch with people earlier, then I wouldn't have felt comfortable doing that. It would have been too bizarre.
Once, this had been the life I’d wanted. Even chosen. Now, though, I couldn’t believe that there had been a time when this kind of monotony and silence, this most narrow of existences, had been preferable. Then again, once, I’d never known anything else.
I felt a sense of fulfillment that an action plan, which I'd laid on the table on the 2nd of February 1990, had been fulfilled, had been properly implemented within the time frame which I envisaged.
I've always been someone that sets achievable short-term goals. I've never been someone that's had a five-year plan, or a three-year plan. That just seems to lead to a lot of disappointment, and doesn't give you the chance to be flexible. So I've just always been someone that's sort of reassessed where I'm at, and set goals that are realistic. And luckily, I've had plenty of chances to recalibrate and adjust, and good fortune's come my way.
As a teenager I had never been able to accept the fact of having to go to the back of a bus or sit in the segregated section of a train. The first time I had been seated behind a curtain in a dining car, I felt as if the curtain had been dropped on my selfhood.
Obviously this stuff takes a bit of planning, but I've always been someone that sets achievable short-term goals. I've never been someone that's had a five-year plan, or a three-year plan. That just seems to lead to a lot of disappointment, and doesn't give you the chance to be flexible. So I've just always been someone that's sort of reassessed where I'm at, and set goals that are realistic. And luckily, I've had plenty of chances to recalibrate and adjust, and good fortune's come my way.
Depression, for me, has been a couple of different things - but the first time I felt it, I felt helpless, hopeless, and things I had never felt before. I lost myself and my will to live.
I've always had people around me who will love me for me, regardless of whether the football went well or if I'd have had to go down a different route. I've always felt that no matter where I've been or what I've been doing, I've always had that to fall back on, which is comforting.
I've never been lonely. I've been in a room... I've felt suicidal, I've been depressed. I've felt awful ... awful beyond all , but I never felt that one other person could enter that room and cure what was bothering me...or that any number of people could enter that room. In other words, loneliness is something I've never been bothered with because I've always had this terrible itch for solitude.
The Chinese tell time by 'The Year of the Horse' or 'The Year of the Dragon.' I tell time by 'The Year of the Back' and 'The Year of the Elbow.' This year it's 'The Year of the Ulnar Nerve.' Someone once asked me if I had any physical incapacities of my own. 'Sure I do,' I said. 'One big one - Jim Palmer.'
I've never been someone that's had a five-year plan, or a three-year plan. That just seems to lead to a lot of disappointment, and doesn't give you the chance to be flexible.
But then I got a job selling coffee at the York Theatre, and when I met theatre people, something clicked. I felt comfortable with them; I felt like myself. I decided to go to drama school based just on that feeling. I had never done any acting.
Someone asked me...how it felt and I was reminded of a story that a fellow townsman of ours used to tell--Abraham Lincoln. They asked him how he felt once after an unsuccessful election. He said he felt like a little boy who had stubbed his toe in the dark. He said that he was too old to cry, but it hurt too much to laugh.
The other thing that I got back then - the Parker novels have never had much of anything to do with race. There have been a few black characters here and there, but the first batch of books back then, I got a lot of letters from urban black guys in their 20s, 30s, 40s. What were they seeing that they were reacting to? And I think I finally figured it out - at that time, they were guys who felt very excluded from society, that they had been rejected by the greater American world.
I felt a certain modicum of success because I had been paid well to be an actor for the first time in my life, but I felt like I had done adolescent work on the show, and stepping into the New York theater arena was the first time I felt like I'd come into my own. I felt like I was proving myself in a gladiatorial arena.
I had been a Maoist, and then when the Gang of Four was overthrown, I was completely distraught. I was bedridden for three weeks; it was a very painful experience for me. Not only because I had been wrong, but because I felt really embarrassed that I had been lecturing and pontificating with such self-confidence.
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