GQ August 1984

That Certain Smile of KAREN ALLEN
By: John Lombardi

After two years onstage, she has a new sexy movie and some new moves

[Karen in GQ] She's one of the reasons you move to New York. Karen Allen is the girl you glimpse and lose forever on the corner at Fifth Avenue and Fifty-seventh Street, just before your cab jerks east, playing bumper cars with a new but already cracked and dying city bus (symbol of why you'll one day move out of New York). She's not just pretty or sexy, a little girl or a femme fatale, a Calvin Klein instant intimacy commercial; she's what the movies and the city used to be about: urban life as endless possibility—Katharine Hepburn dumping Gig Young for Spencer Tracy in The Desk Set; Audrey Hepburn giving feminism a classy leg up in Breakfast at Tiffany's.

Do you remember Karen Allen in Raiders of the Lost Ark? Little backless white dress, whippet body, legs like Makarova, ankle-deep in live snakes . . . knocking back drinks and wise guys in a tough bar while Indiana Jones proves that butch is back. And yet, a face like the young Patricia Neal, an unpremeditated voice—she looks like a real person playing an adventuress in a suburban teenager's fantasy.

Karen Allen's movie career began six years ago with Animal House, John Landis' unlikely low-budget college-humor smash: She was the one with the rock-and-roll heart who beat the boys at strip poker [actually, that was The Wanderers, ed.]. Then she did Phil Kaufman's The Wanderers; again a hip girl, a guitar player, when the Fifties were becoming the Sixties. After that came A Small Circle of Friends, Rob Cohen's smart, underrated movie about college kids during the Vietnam War—and something Karen could really act in. "The essence of Karen is intelligence," Cohen says. "She's very, very challenging. She does not accept things just because they're in a script. She was the person I could always count on for stability and honesty, diligence and talent. She has star presence, but she also emerged as the most liked, the most sought-after of all the members of the cast."

Next came Cruising with director Billy Friedkin, of The French Connection and The Exorcist. Friedkin's "collaborative" ideas ran to withholding the script from Allen entirely. She was playing the girlfriend of a young cop (Al Pacino) who goes into the homosexual underground to try to trap a killer; her character wasn't supposed to know what was going on in Pacino's life, so, Friedkin reasoned, why did the actress need to see a script?

Then Karen did Raiders. She had some ideas about her Marion Ravenwood role, too, but they didn't make a dent in the little L.A. Dodgers helmet that Stephen Spielberg favors on the set. Talking about the experience, and the fact that Kate Capshaw replaced her as the female lead in the Raiders sequel, Allen smiles philosophically: "They told me in the beginning the stories were really about Indiana Jones, that the woman's role would change. Well, I'm not wild about the idea of sequels anyway."

Alan Parker Tapped her for Shoot the Moon right after Raiders. She played Albert Finney's mistress, the reason he leaves his wife, Diane Keaton. Again, in assessing Allen's impact, Parker identified the essence of her appeal: "She knows there's an easier, though far less gratifying, road to success—one based simply on her beauty. She fights such stereotypes mightily."


It's a daily fight, which is why you haven't seen the 32-year-old Karen Allen on the big screen lately. She took two years off to do plays (Two for the Seesaw at the Berkshire Theatre Festival; Hellen Keller in Monday After the Miracle at the Actor's Studio and on Broadway; and Extremities Off-Braodway) because "There's a tendency to typecast, and I just didn't want to go on being Bette Davis with snakes every role." She sips her spritzer at Joanna's on Eighteenth Street, a kind of Elaine's South for young fashionables, and denies the letter if not the law of Parker's appraisal: "Beauty shmooty," she says, "I'm an actress, that's all."

Meanwhile, two men have fallen in love with her in the last fifteen minutes: the tall fellow, looking like Doctor J in effete sneakers, who accompanied Karen to this interview and left only reluctantly; and the waiter, who looks like a young Erik Estrada, perhaps, his gleaming white shirt dropping in romantic swoops from his tight black vest. When Allen says she doesn't know if she feels like eating, the guy seems stricken.

The talk turns to craft: "The whole problem with film scripts today," Karen says, "is that they float around and float around until either actors or studios or directors commit themselves, and then there's a rush to get into preproduction, and the actual development of the script suffers. Unfortunately, many times, all the creative effort goes into the deal, and when it comes to the basic reasons people become actors and directors, everybody's too knocked out to try."

Allen's strict regard for the verities stems from her background and training. She was born on a farm in southern Illinois and, because her dad was an FBI man, moved around the country—Tennessee, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland. When, after false starts in design study in Manhattan and boutique management in Georgetown, she dived into acting, it was with the Washington Theatre Lab, a group guided by Anthony Abeson and Robert Bailey. Bailey was something of a mentor. He'd studied with Jerzy Grotowski's Polish Laboratory Theatre, and believed emotional intensity was to the actor what the verb is to the writer. "I was there for four years," Allen says; "it was a communal situation where we were encouraged to participate in the whole work—writing, acting, directing. We were supported by grants, so a lot of the time pressure was off. Today I have to marvel when I see really good work done in film, because I know what the pressure is like. We were in a hothouse in Washington, and yet the point, the reason we were there, was never forgotten."

I ask Allen if she things the movie problem is especially bad for actresses.

"Every so often, when I'm reading scripts I don't like, I think it is, but really there's been a lot of progress. What Jane Fonda has done is start a production company herself. She develops film projects—not necessarily for herself—but where I think a lot more attention is paid to the growth of the female characters. They're not just cardboard. And Goldie Hawn has done a lot. And Meryl Streep developed Silkwood to some extent. But to be absolutely honest, it's not so much that there's a lack of good women's roles—men's roles are lousy too."

Karen, who has been smoking like Bogey, fumbles in her black and white Sino/Italo reverse-wale coat for matches. The Estrada clone, who has been hovering expectantly, leaps into the conversational breach with a match: "Lucha?!"

"Thank you," Karen says. "And I'll have a cappuccino, too." Then she hits him with the smile that slew Landis, Cohen, and Parker. It's a matter of freckles, pert nose, a wide mouth, and vast eyes the color of the ocean off Montauk at about 5:30P.M. on an August afternoon. The waiter looks as if he's drowning.

"Ahem," I venture.

"Liv Ullman," Allen continues, through the smoke, "has found a way to work, with all of the problems. In a way she's a model for me. If I get discouraged or frustrated, I find an Ullman movie and make myself feel better.

By this time Karen is speaking to a spot in the air just over our heads; she's gesturing, sort of playing the harp, somewhere between earnest and happy:

"Liv has a revelatory quality that works for her not only as an actress but also as a woman. She can appear to be a fully grown adult in one scene, and two seconds later, her face will change completely and you can see that she's a child. She doesn't seem afraid to show these things, to use what's deepest inside to illuminate human nature. It's as if she were saying, 'Let's see how far we can go.' Ingrid Bergman did that too, in Autumn Sonata. And Kate Nelligan did it recently in Without a Trace.

"With Ullman, though, didn't a lot of that have to do with her personal relationship with Ingmar Bergman?" I ask.

"Possibly," Allen says, a little reluctantly. "Or maybe it's just that Bergman took the time to really work with her. Woody Allen seems to be doing the same thing with Mia Farrow."

"But in the absence of mentors or catalysts, isn't there incredible pressure to keep your career's momentum going once it's rolling?" I ask. For some reason, I feel the need to be practical.

"Sure, but the real pressure is from yourself. Lots of people told me I was crazy to do plays after Raiders and Moon, but I felt I really needed to do them. I hadn't been on a stage in five years, and I wanted to address the reason I became an actress in the first place. Now I'm happy about going back to the movies."

Karen Allen's return to film will begin next month with Until September, a small movie shot in France by director Richard Marquand (Eye of the Needle and Return of the Jedi). Then comes Starman, with Jeff Bridges, scheduled for release later this year or in early '85. It's about an alien who comes to earth and begins a love affair with a woman after he takes on the appearance of her late husband.

"Until September is a love story," explains Karen, "but really funny, which is something love stories tend to leave out. It's about Mo, a young horticulturist who goes to Paris in August, when the French are all away on vacation; she gets involved with a handsome banker [French heartthrob Thierry Lhermitte] who has just packed off his wife, kids, and mistress. The guy is just fooling around at first, and I'm just so midwestern and serious, and then we both . . . well, we both learn to do what's hardest for each of us." She stops and slugs at her coffee. "There's a lot of sex."

"The story of Mo."

"I knew you'd say that."

"Why is this film better than Raiders or one of the other things you might have done?"

"It's not a question of 'better than Raiders,' because I was never slated to do the sequels. But Richard Marquand is an incredibly sensitive director; he believes in improvisation, and he let us try things you just don't get to do on tight shooting schedules. And Thierry is great, so smart and funny. He belongs to an acting/writing group called Les Splendid. They're like the Monty Python of France. They've just done something called—I don't know how you say it but it translates to 'Santa Claus is a shit.'"

"How can your like somebody named Thierry?" I growl.

Allen smites Estrada with the smile again. He staggers to the checkroom and returns dragging a huge valise stuffed with clothes and makeup (she'd just come from a photo shooting). She stubs out her cigarette, shrugs into her international coat, and hefts her valise through Joanna's Victorian/deco doorway. She looks like a preppie Belle Starr.

"You want to get married and have babies?" I blurt.

Allen laughs, sticks out her lower lib like Marion Ravenwood: "Any more questions?"

Copyright © 1984 by The Condé Nast Publications Inc., All Rights Reserved