Joan Allen is an accomplished stage and screen actor who is perhaps best known for her portrayal of First Lady Pat Nixon in Oliver Stone's 1995 film Nixon. Allen grew up in a small town in northern Illinois and attended Eastern Illinois University, where she met John Malkovich. She moved to Chicago to join Malkovich's Steppenwolf Theater group in 1977, then moved to New York in 1983 to pursue a career as an actor. Her Broadway debut in Burn This (1987, with Malkovich as co-star) earned her a Tony award. The next year she was nominated for a Tony for her performance in The Heidi Chronicles. Allen has had similar success in Hollywood -- she has been nominated twice for Academy Awards for best supporting actress (Nixon and 1996's The Crucible) and once for best actress (2000's The Contender). Tall and thin, Allen is a versatile character and sometime leading lady who is popular with critics and A-list filmmakers and yet doesn't seem like a big-time Hollywood star. Her other films include: Manhunter (1986, with William Petersen); Tucker: A Man and His Dreams (1988, starring Jeff Bridges); Searching for Bobby Fischer (1993, with Laurence Fishburne); The Ice Storm (1997, with Sigourney Weaver); Face/Off (1997, opposite John Travolta); Pleasantville (1998, playing Tobey Maguire's mom); The Bourne Supremacy (2004, starring Matt Damon); and The Upside of Anger (2005, with Kevin Costner).
Career Highlights: The Ice Storm, Peggy Sue Got Married, The Crucible
First Major Screen Credit: Manhunter (1986)
Biography
Largely underappreciated for years in Hollywood before her Oscar-nominated turn as the First Lady in Nixon (1995), Joan Allen has had a distinguished career encompassing the stage, screen, and television. A native of Rochelle, Illinois, where she was born August 20, 1956, the blond, swanlike actress developed an interest in acting while in high school. Voted Most Likely to Succeed by her senior class, Allen went on to study theatre at Eastern Illinois University. She then moved to Chicago, where she became one of the founding members of the vaunted Steppenwolf Theatre Company, along with such respected talents as Gary Sinise and John Malkovich.
Allen made her screen debut with a small role in the 1985 film Compromising Positions and a year later played two wildly different characters in Manhunter and Peggy Sue Got Married. Her portrayals of a tragically confused young woman who attempts to seduce a serial killer in the former film and a brainy high school student in the latter impressed a number of critics, but it was on the stage that Allen was most appreciated. In 1988, she won a Tony award for her Broadway debut performance in Burn This, and a year later she earned her second Tony nomination for her role in Wendy Wasserstein's highly acclaimed The Heidi Chronicles.
Following increasingly substantial roles in such films as In Country (1989), Ethan Frome (1992), and Searching for Bobby Fischer (1993), Allen won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomination for her stunning portrayal of First Lady Pat Nixon in Oliver Stone's Nixon. The acclaim surrounding her performance in the 1995 film finally gave Allen the Hollywood recognition she deserved; the following year this recognition was further enhanced with her Oscar-nominated turn as the long-suffering Elizabeth Proctor in Nicholas Hytner's adaptation of The Crucible.
More praise came Allen's way in 1997, when she headlined a stellar ensemble cast in Ang Lee's lauded adaptation of Rick Moody's The Ice Storm. Starring as a troubled upper middle-class Connecticut housewife alongside the likes of Kevin Kline, Sigourney Weaver, Christina Ricci, and Tobey Maguire, Allen gave repression a stirring, beautifully nuanced name. That same year she went in a completely different direction, starring as the wife of an FBI agent (John Travolta) in John Woo's popular action thriller Face/Off. Allen returned to the realm of the repressed housewife in 1998, starring (and reuniting with Maguire) in the acclaimed 1950s-set comedy drama Pleasantville. The turn of the century found Allen taking leads in a trio of issue-oriented dramas: In the multi-character handgun treatise All the Rage (released on video in 2000), she played the wife of a short-fused lawyer (reuniting with Pleasantville's Jeff Daniels in the process); in the Irish production When the Sky Falls, she teamed with The Long Good Friday (1980) director John Mackenzie to tell the true, tragic story of a Dublin crime reporter; and in Rod Lurie's The Contender, Allen nabbed her biggest role to date -- and her first Best Actress Oscar nomination -- as a would-be U.S. vice president who finds herself at the center of a sex scandal.
After all the attention for The Contender, the savvy Allen continued to oscillate between big roles in low-profile independent films and small roles in big-budget popcorn fare, to even greater success. She featured prominently in two of the biggest box-office hits of 2004: the sentimental romance The Notebook and the wildly successful second installment of the Jason Bourne franchise, The Bourne Supremacy. In the latter, she dug into a meaty, sympathetic supporting role as an all-business CIA agent who pursues the framed title character. Spring 2005 saw the near-concurrent release of two of her indie films, both of which premiered at Sundance Festivals from years prior: Campbell Scott's lapsed-hippie family drama Off the Map and Mike Binder's Terms of Endearment-ish saga The Upside of Anger. The former cast Allen against type as a let-it-all-hang-out New Mexico naturalist who finds her family coming apart at the seams in the mid-1970s. More widely acclaimed was her Anger appearance: As a drunk, headstrong, suburban Detroit housewife who lashes out at her four daughters -- and everyone else -- after her husband leaves the family, Allen turned in a performance that was both caustic and relatable, and garnered some of the best notices of her film career. ~ Rebecca Flint Marx, All Movie Guide
Allen, the youngest of four children, was born in Rochelle, Illinois, the daughter of Dorothea Marie (née Wirth), a homemaker, and James Jefferson Allen, a gas station owner.[1][2] She has an older brother, David, and two older sisters, Mary and Lynn.[3] Allen attended Rochelle Township High School, and was voted most likely to succeed. She transferred to Northern Illinois University in 1976, where she graduated with a BFA in Theatre Performance.
Allen began her performing career as a stage actress and on television before making her film debut in the movie, Compromising Positions (1985). She has been a member of the Steppenwolf Theatre Company ensemble since 1977.
In 2001, Allen starred in the mini-series The Mists of Avalon on TNT and earned an Emmy nomination for the role. In 2005, she received many positive notices[citation needed] for her leading role in the comedy/drama The Upside of Anger, in which she played an alcoholic housewife.
In 1990, Allen married actor Peter Friedman. The couple separated in 2002, but live close to each other to share time with their daughter, Sadie, born in 1994.[7] She has a Boston Terrier named Pippie.
