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Joan Allen: John Malkovich
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Joan Allen suffers from the Eastern curse more so than any other Hall of Fame inductee. She’s done so many great things as an actress. She has performed on Broadway, helped found a legendary theater troupe and kissed John Travolta.
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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.
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While attending Eastern Illinois University, the tall, angular Allen attracted the attention of John Malkovich, who invited her to move to Chicago and join the famed Steppenwolf Theatre. Allen developed a restrained acting style that enabled her to disappear completely into her parts. She has always shown a penchant for subtext, projecting much more than the written script would suggest.
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