Rassegna stampa di Joan Allen

Figlia di una casalinga e di un custode di garage, Joan Allen frequenta la Northern Illinois University dove fa amicizia con John Malkovich, con il quale un anno dopo la laurea, nel 1977, fonda la Steppenwolf Theatre Company, a Chicago. Nel 1986 viene inserita tra i dodici attori esordienti più promettenti dell'anno nella classifica del John Willis' Screen World, Vol. 38 e nel 1987 esordisce a Broadway con lo spettacolo Burn This, in cui recita anche l'amico Malkovich, e si guadagna un Tony Award. Il suo primo film importante al cinema è Peggy Sue si è sposata e da lì la carriera della Allen andrà sempre meglio: nel 1996 ottiene per due nomination come attrice non protagonista (Nixon - Gli intrighi del potere e La seduzione del male) e ne guadagna una da protagonista nel film del 2001 The Contender.

WHEN Joan Allen returned to Broadway last weekend after a two-decade hiatus, she swept briskly onstage like a quintessential New Yorker arriving at work. She whisked off her coat, dropped her morning pastry on her desk and hurtled into a disquisition on her subway ride.
And like the art gallery owner she portrays in “Impressionism,” a new play that opens on March 24 and also stars Jeremy Irons, Ms. Allen, 52, is a veteran Upper West Sider (prewar building, no doorman) who traverses the city in high-heeled boots, having settled here shortly after visiting for the first time at 27 to star in a British war drama.
But unlike her slightly saltier character, she is given to a very un-Manhattanite exclamation: “Gosh!” or, for special emphasis, “Oh, my gosh!” In a recent interview at a rehearsal space in Times Square, Ms. Allen, a Tony Award winner and three-time Oscar nominee, averaged eight goshes an hour.
This is a linguistic remnant of Ms. Allen’s upbringing in small-town Illinois, where her father owned a Deep Rock gas station, and happiness was a chance to ride, dog at her side, in the truck that delivered fuel oil to the local farms. Somehow regal and wholesome in equal measure, Ms. Allen remains deeply connected to her inner country girl — the girl whose eyes once widened at the purple platform shoes worn by an “exotic” fellow Eastern Illinois University theater student named John Malkovich.
Raised to be unostentatious and trained as an ensemble actor, Ms. Allen never became a fire-breathing scene stealer like Mr. Malkovich.
Resolutely understated in work and in life, she has been more inclined to disappear into her roles. She is, willfully, the anti-diva: “a noncelebrity actor,” as she put it. Which has its pluses and minuses.

On the plus side: “What’s interesting is that after all these years she’s still completely pure,” said Jack O’Brien, director of “Impressionism,” who last worked with Ms. Allen in the 1980s. “There’s no ego involved. There’s no murk to cut through. There’s no posse trailing.”
On the minus side: “She’s not a huge name,” as Mr. Irons put it, hastening to add that he had “asked around a lot” about her and found “from every quarter, great admiration.”
Tall and fat free, with blond tresses and slim skirts, Ms. Allen, an ardent exerciser, wears her years well. During intermission at a preview of “Impressionism,” a theatergoer from Brooklyn whipped out her BlackBerry to Google Ms. Allen’s age. “Oh, my God! How is she so stunning? Maybe she’s had work?” she said to her friend, who responded: “She’s so skinny. I don’t understand that kind of skinny.”
Ms. Allen, who lives with her 15-year-old daughter, Sadie, and her 3-year-old Boston terrier, Pippi, is probably most familiar to mass audiences as the C.I.A. operative who pursues Matt Damon’s Jason Bourne. But she has been a steadily working actor since 1977, when she joined Mr. Malkovich in the second season of the renowned Steppenwolf Theater in Chicago.
At Steppenwolf Ms. Allen, who worked by day as a secretary, quickly became known as an actor who could transform herself radically from one production to the next: she was a “plain woman with a limp” in “And a Nightingale Sang” who shape-shifted into a stunning ex-beauty queen in “The Miss Firecracker Contest.”
In 1983, when asked to reprise her part in “Nightingale,” the British war drama, at Lincoln Center, Ms. Allen finally made it to New York, a dream. “I remember just walking the streets,” she said. “I was like, ‘I’m so lucky,’ and then I was just, ‘Oh, my gosh.’ ”
Reviewing the play for The New York Times, Frank Rich remarked on the debut of “an exceptionally winning and delicate actress named Joan Allen.” He also singled out “the excellent Peter Friedman,” whose character romanced Ms. Allen’s — and who eventually married Ms. Allen himself. The two divorced in 2002.
In 1987 Ms. Allen landed on Broadway in back-to-back productions that established her as a leading lady. She won a Tony Award for her role opposite a scenery-chewing Mr. Malkovich in “Burn This” and a Tony nomination for her performance (opposite Mr. Friedman) in Wendy Wasserstein’s “Heidi Chronicles.” Together the two shows logged 1,059 performances.
“After that, I think, I was burned out,” Ms. Allen said. “The characters were not particularly happy, and it was lot to dredge up and live with eight times a week.”
Assisted by Brian Mann of ICM, her longtime agent, Ms. Allen decided to focus on her fledgling film career. She did not necessarily mean to leave the stage entirely, she said. But that is what happened when movie parts kept coming, and especially after she gave birth to Sadie in 1994.
“You just don’t want to leave your kid at night,” Ms. Allen said.
In film Ms. Allen proved singularly adept at playing, as Mr. Mann put it, “the wife of ...” and “the mother of ....” She became a skilled portraitist of repressed and betrayed women, finding a way to suggest the lust, anger or yearning simmering beneath placid, competent or brittle surfaces. (In “Pleasantville” she played a brilliant sendup of these women, a sitcom mom who stirs to life, offering up marshmallow squares one minute and pleasuring herself in the bathtub the next.)
For her eerily dead-on portrayal of Pat Nixon in Oliver Stone’s “Nixon,” Ms. Allen received her first Academy Award nomination in 1996. This, she said, allowed her to climb “a rung up the ladder,” landing roles as Daniel Day Lewis’s forbidding wife in “The Crucible” and as Kevin Kline’s stifled wife in “The Ice Storm.”
It took Ms. Allen 15 years to be cast as the lead in a movie. That happened in 2000 with “The Contender,” in which she played a senator nominated for the vice presidency who grapples with a sex scandal. For that performance Ms. Allen lost the Oscar for best actress to Julia Roberts.
Since then her parts have allowed her to act out more, as with her radiantly raging and boozing mother of four girls in “The Upside of Anger.” She has alternated leading roles in independent films with supporting roles in big-budget movies. Her range is summed up by two recent parts: a sadistic prison warden in “Death Race” with lines like “Activate the death heads!” and a protagonist named “She” in Sally Potter’s “Yes,” a post-9/11 love story with dialogue in iambic pentameter.
“Yes,” an intimate low-budget film, was one of her favorite filmmaking experiences, she said; “The Ice Storm,” directed by Ang Lee, remains, in her judgment, her “most perfect film.”
From time to time, she said, her agent would approach her with theater offers and she would say, “I hope the desire comes back.” Then, last June, Mr. O’Brien, a veteran director, called Ms. Allen out of the blue and asked if he could stop by her apartment. Within 15 minutes he had appeared in her kitchen, presenting her with the script of “Impressionism” and saying, “Darling, you absolutely have to do it.”
Set in an art gallery, “Impressionism” is a romantic comedy about the relationship between two middle-aged professionals battered by life. Mr. Irons had already committed to playing the male lead, a world-weary photojournalist. She was to consider the part of the vibrant, quick-witted gallery owner unlucky in love.
Reading the script immediately, Ms. Allen said that she was “blown away.” It was, she said, “so pretty, just so pretty, and not cynical and very open and funny.” She called her agent, who was at a bar mitzvah in Detroit.
“I was like, ‘Brian, you’re not going to believe this: I actually want to do a play,’ ” Ms. Allen said.
“Impressionism” was written by Michael Jacobs, a creator of sitcoms like “Dinosaurs” and “Charles in Charge” whose last Broadway play, “Cheaters,” had a four-week run 31 years ago. Bringing an “untried piece” straight to Broadway is a risk, Mr. Irons said, but all involved are “going on hunch.”
Ms. Allen said she did “a bit of gallery hopping” to prepare for her role but instinctively understood her character, Katharine, who, as her director advised her, could not be played as “poor, pitiful Pearl.”
“Like Katharine, a couple of my closest friends are these very capable, interesting, independent, self-sufficient women who don’t go out on dates for like seven years at a time,” she said. “And they’re very healthy people.”
Much of the play depends on the chemistry between Ms. Allen and Mr. Irons, who is 60. By coincidence the two had a chance to get to know each other first. They spent a month in Santa Fe at the end of last year, starring in a Lifetime biopic of Georgia O’Keeffe co-produced by Ms. Allen.
Their creative styles are very different. “We were not doubling in brass,” Mr. O’Brien said. Ms. Allen is very private, burrowing into a part without much discussion. Mr. Irons likes, as Mr. O’Brien said, to “toss the ball about” with his “self-confident British style of attack on a role.”
Mr. O’Brien called “Impressionism” a play for intelligent people of middle age. “Nobody shoots up, nobody gets raped, and nobody changes sex,” he said. “It was the perfect vehicle to bring Joan back to the stage.”
And, interestingly, it is the very same stage that Ms. Allen left 20 years ago, the same theater — now called the Gerald Schoenfeld — where both “Burn This” and “The Heidi Chronicles” were performed.
“It all feels very familiar to me,” she said.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: March 8, 2009 An article on the cover this weekend about Joan Allen, who is appearing on Broadway in “Impressionism,” at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theater, gives an outdated opening date for the play. After the section went to press, the opening was changed to March 24; the play is not opening on Thursday. A theater listing on Friday in the Weekend section also included the outdated date.
Da The New York Times, 6 marzo 2009

Acclamata come una delle interpreti più dotate del cinema americano contemporaneo, nella sua carriera Joan Allen ha ricevuto tre nomination agli Oscar: due come miglior attrice non protagonista (nel 1996 per Gli intrighi del potere – Nixon e nel 1997 per La seduzione del male) e una come protagonista, nel 2001 per The Contender di Rod Lurie. Nata a Rochelle, Illinois, frequenta la Northern Illinois University, dove si lega professionalmente a John Malkovich: proprio con Malkovich, fonda nel 1977 a Chicago la Steppenwolf Theatre Company, grazie alla quale si fa le ossa come attrice, alternando il palcoscenico a piccole partecipazioni televisive. Nel 1987 debutta a Broadway con lo spettacolo Burn This, in cui recita lo stesso Malkovich, e ottiene un Tony Award, massimo riconoscimento teatrale americano. Negli stessi anni, arrivano le prime offerte dal cinema: Posizioni compromettenti di Frank Perry, con Susan Sarandon (1985), Peggy Sue si è sposata (1985), Manhunter – Frammenti di un omicidio di Michael Mann (1986), Tucker - Un uomo e il suo sogno di Coppola (1988) entrambi di Francis Ford Coppola. Dopo Ethan Frome di John Madden (1993), il successo arriva con la straordinaria interpretazione di Pat Nixon ne Gli intrighi del potere – Nixon di Oliver Stone (1995), che le procura la prima candidatura agli Oscar come miglior attrice non protagonista. La seconda arriva l’anno successivo con La seduzione del male di Nicholas Hytner (1996) e da allora Joan Allen diventa una delle attrici più richieste di Hollywood: tra gli altri film del periodo, vanno ricordati Tempesta di ghiaccio di Ang Lee (1997), Face/Off di John Woo (1997), Pleasantville di Gary Ross,(1998) e The Contender di Rod Lurie, con Gary Oldman e Jeff Bridges, (2000), per il quale viene candidata alla statuetta per la terza volta. Oltre a diversi lavori televisivi, tra cui va menzionato almeno Le nebbie di Avalon di Uli Edel ( 2001), grazie al quale conquista un Emmy Awards, la Allen è tra i protagonisti di film come Off the Map di Campbell Scott (2003), The Bourne Supremacy di Paul Greengrass, con Matt Damon (2004), Litigi d’amore di Mike Binder, con Kevin Costner (2005), The Bourne Ultimatum -Il ritorno dello sciacallo di Paul Greengrass (2007).