"The King's Speech" is the odds-on favorite to win the Oscar tonight as the best motion picture, and as you may know, one of the movie's stars is North Carolina native Jennifer Ehle, who plays the wife of the king's speech therapist.
What you may not know is that Ehle is the daughter of one of the most creative people ever to serve in North Carolina state government.
Her father, John Ehle, 85, a novelist and Winston-Salem resident, was a special assistant to Gov. Terry Sanford in 1963-64. Sanford hired Ehle to be his idea man and later called him "a one-man think tank."
Ehle at the time was a professor of communications at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and he had no interest in working in government.
But Sanford, who had an eye for talent, kept courting Ehle until he relented.
"Ehle's great strength was that he had limited ties to government bureaucracies and party politics; he was open to new ideas and largely unconcerned with the political fallout from unorthodox means of getting things done," wrote historians Robert R. Korstad and James Leloudis in their fine 2010 book, "To Right These Wrongs."
"Together, the two men began working on a host of projects ranging from a state film board to an arts conservatory, a summer academic camp for school children, and studies of social and economic development in poor rural communities," they wrote.
Sanford and Ehle largely funded their projects with money from New York foundations, bypassing the state legislature.
The result was a series of initiatives that prompted one national publication to label North Carolina the "DixieDynamo."
The Sanford-Ehle collaboration helped spark the N.C. School of the Arts in Winston-Salem and planted the idea much later for the N.C. School of Science and Math in Durham.
It led to the creation of the N.C. Governor's School for academically gifted students and the N.C. Film Board, patterned after Canada's film board, to encourage the creation of movies in North Carolina.
Perhaps the most controversial initiative was the N.C. Fund, a nonprofit organization financed by a grant from the Ford Foundation to fight poverty in the state. It would help serve as a model for part of Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty.
Though Ehle would serve on some national advisory panels in the '60s, he largely devoted the rest of his life to the arts. He wrote 17 books, many of them works of fiction set in his native Appalachian Mountains.
The Ehles would be one of North Carolina's leading families of the arts. His wife, British-born actress Rosemary Harris, is a star of the New York and London stage. Their daughter Jennifer, fittingly a product of the N.C. School of the Arts, followed her mother into acting.
Perhaps her best-known role was opposite actor Colin Firth in the BBC's 1995 version of "Pride and Prejudice."
John Ehle may be the least famous member of his family. But he has had an immeasurable impact on North Carolina.
