Joan Allen

Actor

• Born: August 20, 1956
• Place of Birth: Rochelle, Illinois

Contribution: Joan Allen is an Academy Award–nominated actor best known for her roles in The Crucible (1996), The Contender (2000), and the Jason Bourne franchise of films.

Background

Joan Allen was born on August 20, 1956, in Rochelle, Illinois. She was the youngest of four children. Her father, Jeff, was a gas station attendant, and her mother, Dorothy, a housewife. She attended Rochelle County High School, where she became interested in acting. Once an intensely shy child, Allen believed that acting might allow her to express repressed emotions. She became involved in the school’s theater program and enjoyed expressing her own feelings through fictional characters.

After graduating from high school, Allen enrolled at Eastern Illinois University. While there she met aspiring actor John Malkovich, who believed in her acting skills and encouraged her to pursue an acting career. Allen eventually transferred to Northern Illinois University and earned a bachelor’s degree in theater in 1976.

In 1977 she received a call from Malkovich, who remembered her from college and invited her to join him at the new Steppenwolf Theatre Company in Chicago. Allen accepted his offer and worked as a secretary in the city to pay her rent while she performed at night with future stars such as Terry Kinney, Gary Sinise, and Malkovich.

At Steppenwolf, Allen developed a quiet, subtle style of acting. She downplayed her own presence as the actor and focused instead on her characters’ internal struggles. As she gained recognition, she became known for her understated yet complex performances.

Career

Allen’s first professional performances were in productions of plays by Wallace Shawn, Anton Chekhov, and Caryl Churchill. As Steppenwolf slowly grew in size and prestige, the actors were invited to New York in 1983 to perform C. P. Taylor’s And the Nightingale Sang. Allen gained recognition as an actor in New York City, and landed a role in a Public Theatre production of Christopher Durang’s The Marriage of Bette and Boo (1985). In 1987, she starred with Malkovich in a Broadway presentation of Lanford Wilson’s Burn This, for which she won a Tony Award. The role established her reputation as a lead actor and led to greater demand for her talent. The next year, she returned to Broadway to star in a production of Wendy Wasserstein’s Pulitzer Prize–winning The Heidi Chronicles, for which she was nominated for another Tony Award.

Allen’s success in theater eventually afforded her the opportunity to try her hand at screen acting. In 1985, she appeared in a small role in the comedy film Compromising Positions. That same year, she debuted on the small screen in NBC’s three-part miniseries Evergreen. Allen continued to land small roles in films throughout the rest of the 1980s. She next appeared in a supporting role as a blind woman who falls in love with a serial killer in Michael Mann’s 1986 thriller Manhunter, the first film adaptation of Thomas Harris’s novel Red Dragon. During the same year, Allen received a part in Francis Ford Coppola’s Peggy Sue Got Married.

Allen returned to the small screen to act in several made-for-television films, including an adaptation of the Arthur Miller play All My Sons (1987), CBS’s The Room Upstairs (1987), and HBO’s Without Warning: The James Brady Story (1991). Allen was cast in several supporting roles in mainstream feature films such as Ethan Frome (1993), an adaptation of the Edith Wharton novel of the same name, Searching for Bobby Fischer (1993), and Mad Love (1995).

Her situation changed when Oliver Stone cast her in his 1995 biopic Nixon. Allen’s performance as President Richard Nixon’s wife, Pat, was lauded by critics and earned her an Academy Award nomination for best supporting actress. With this success, Allen gradually began to find her place in Hollywood and she began to receive roles in prominent films alongside A-list actors.

In 1996, she played opposite Daniel Day-Lewis in The Crucible, an adaptation of Arthur Miller’s 1953 play about the Salem witch trials. For her performance as John Proctor’s stoic wife, Elizabeth Proctor, Allen was again nominated for an Academy Award for best supporting actress. The next year, she appeared in two high-profile pictures, The Ice Storm and Face/Off. In 1998, Allen garnered widespread critical acclaim for her role as 1950s housewife Betty Parker in the fantasy-drama Pleasantville.

Allen received her first starring film role as Helen, a woman whose husband shoots her lover, in the little-seen It’s the Rage (1999). In 2000, she starred as fictional Irish journalist Sinead Hamilton, who attempts to infiltrate the Irish criminal underground, in When the Sky Falls. Allen followed this with her most widely praised performance to date, that of fictional senator Laine Billings Hanson in the 2000 political drama The Contender. In the film, Allen’s character makes a successful vice presidential bid until a sex scandal from her distant past returns to threaten the campaign. Allen was lauded for her work and was nominated for an Academy Award for best actress. The nomination brought her further fame and new projects to consider.

Following an Emmy nomination for her role as Morgause in TNT’s Arthurian miniseries The Mists of Avalon, Allen appeared as Anne Hamilton, the disapproving mother of Allie (Rachel McAdams), in the 2004 romantic hit The Notebook. That same year she relentlessly pursued Matt Damon’s Jason Bourne as the tough and confident CIA agent Pamela Landy in the action-thriller The Bourne Supremacy. Allen reprised this role in The Bourne Ultimatum (2007) and The Bourne Legacy (2012).

In 2009, Allen took on the title role in Lifetime’s biopic Georgia O’Keefe. Allen was nominated for both an Emmy and a Golden Globe Award for her performance. She also served as an executive producer of the film. Allen guest-starred as mysterious horse farm owner Claire Lachay in six episodes of the short-lived 2012 HBO drama Luck. She narrated the 2013 documentary American Catastrophe: JFK and the Second Term That Never Was and the 2014 documentary Rickover: The Birth of Nuclear Power.

Allen took on several other projects in the mid-to-late 2010s. These include the role of Colonel Margaret Rayne in the fourth season of The Killing (2014); the lead role of Darcy Anderson, a wife who discovers that her husband of twenty-five years has a sinister secret, in Stephen King's A Good Marriage (2014); a supporting role in the feature film Room (2015), based on the novel by Emma Donoghue; and the lead role of politician Claire Warren in the 2016 series The Family. In October 2018, she returned to Broadway to star as Ellen Fine in Keith Lonergan's play The Waverly Gallery. She appeared in another adaptation of a Stephen King work in 2021 in the Julianne Moore miniseries Lisey's Story.

Impact

During her stage and screen career, Joan Allen has displayed her talent for playing hard, reticent characters while still channeling their inner turmoil. As a member of the Steppenwolf Theatre Company since 1977, Allen has been part of an ensemble that has gained wide recognition and acclaim for its productions of works by new and established playwrights, and helped launch the careers of several well-known actors.

Personal Life

In 1990 Allen married actor Peter Friedman, with whom she had acted in her theater days of the 1980s. The two had a daughter, Sadie, in 1994. Allen and Friedman divorced in 2002.

Bibliography

Goodman, Lanie. “’One Minute I’m Pushing the Vacuum Cleaner, the Next I’m Getting Orchids from Giorgio Armani.’” Guardian. Guardian News and Media, 19 Apr. 2001. Web. 25 June 2013.

"Joan Allen." IBDb, www.ibdb.com/broadway-cast-staff/joan-allen-29666. Accessed 23 Sept. 2024.

"Joan Allen (I)." IMDb, 2021, www.imdb.com/name/nm0000260/. Accessed 23

Lucia, Cynthia. “The Star Is the Story: An Interview with Joan Allen.” Cineaste 31.4 (2006): n. pag. Print.

Piepenburg, Erik. “New Bruce Norris Play Will Be Part of Steppenwolf Season.” New York Times. New York Times, 6 Mar. 2013. Web. 10 July 2013.

Sontag, Deborah. “Enter the Anti-Diva, Stage Right.” New York Times, 8 Mar. 2009, New York ed.: AR1. Print.

Weiss, Hedy. “Joan Allen Returning to Steppenwolf.” Chicago Sun-Times. Sun-Times Media, 6 Mar. 2013. Web. 10 July 2013.