Karen Allen steps out the cellar door of her Berkshire Mountains home looking like she
could have just walked off the set of
Raiders of the Lost Ark or
Starman.
"Sorry about the mud — it's that time of year," she calls out to her two visitors — the first reporter and photographer Allen has ever invited to her home for an interview.
It has been a long time between screen sightings of the actress — her romp with Harrison Ford in Raiders was 15 years ago, and Starman came out in 1984. Scrooged with Bill Murray, was in 1988.
But the years have been kind to Allen, who's 44 years old and still could easily pass for Marion Ravenwood from Raiders.
As she shows her guests into the house, a converted 250 year-old barn, she beams with that same fresh, girl-next-door look — huge blue-green eyes and a big wide smile. Only a close look reveals a few gray roots.
She's dressed for comfort, not flash: black cotton slacks, black cotton knit shirt, plaid jacket, no jewelry except a watch, no apparent makeup.
She has set out a lunch in the sunny dining room. Thin slices of an Italian loaf. Thin slices of cucumber. Two small cheeses on a cutting board. A bowl of lettuce leaves. A bowl of strawberries. Tomato slices. And conversation about where she's been for the past few years.
The answer, in a word, is Nicholas, her 5-year-old son.
"Let's just say I decided that while my son is young I don't want to do projects that would take me away for months," she says.
"The first couple of years of his life I found myself bringing him along with me. I had to have a full-time baby-sitter, of course. And sometimes I'd be able to hear him crying on the set, so we decided that the baby-sitter would keep him in my trailer.
"And I'd get up at 5:30 and I wouldn't get home until 8 or 8:30, bone-tired and with a whole
day's work to look at for the next day. He'd be asleep when I left and asleep when I came
home, and I found myself thinking, 'What's wrong with this picture?' "
When Nicholas was 2 1/2, she says, she "came to a screeching halt." "I said to myself, 'I've waited a long time in my life to have a child, and I'm missing it. . . . I want to continue to have a career, but not this way.' "
Lately, she says, she limits herself to smaller projects that allow her to leave Nicholas with her husband.
These days, Allen is very much the country mom, the center of the family for Nicholas and her husband, actor Kale Browne, who's in the TV soap "Another World."
The cellar of the big old house is one big rec room, with play space for Nicholas and outdoor stuff for everybody. Nicholas' school papers and artwork are posted around the house, with its vaulted ceilings and post-and-beam framework. Family photos and notes are fastened to the refrigerator with magnets. Allen's latest knitting project, a two-piece child's outfit, lies on a table in the next room.
She takes her knitting seriously, turning out unique garments in colorful patterns — "I work with 70, 80, 90 colors at the same time," she says. She even teaches an advanced knitting course at the upstate Omega Institute.
And Allen stays in pretty good condition. "I'm about as healthy as a person can be," she says. "I quit smoking seven or eight years ago. Compared to when we did Raiders, I might weigh another 5 pounds or something — I have a pretty good diet. . . I love to do a lot of very active things."
Every morning, she says, she does an hour and a half of Ashtanga yoga, a particularly rigorous discipline that gives her an aerobic workout. She says she has worked on two films lately — Till There Was You with Sarah Jessica Parker, and A Reasonable Woman. Both will be out soon.
But she still misses being part of the world of stage — she has appeared both on and off Broadway — and screen. "I miss just the camaraderie of being in New York," she says. "There's something so wonderful about being an actor in New York."
Lately, Allen does what she can do. "I've been writing a lot," she says. "I did a [screen]
version of
Walker Percy's
novel 'The Second Coming,' which looks like it's going to be made, and I'm working on one
that's my own original idea. And that's been a way to allow myself to continue to feel that
I've got a creative outlet.
"I find myself really feeling like it's possible that maybe the greater contribution I'm going to be able to make through this next phase of my life might be as a writer writing wonderful parts for women, or even writing wonderful parts for myself, you know?"
When Nicholas gets a little older, and she can ease off on the mom role and get back into the actress role, can the world expect to see Karen Allen in another blockbuster of the magnitude of Raiders?
She thinks it over for a minute, and then smiles that big smile.
"I hope so," she says.
Copyright © 1996 Daily News, L.P.