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Joan Allen: Performance
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Joan Allen may not be a movie star in the conventional sense of the term, but her various Oscar nominations confirm that she is one of America's most talented actors. Her latest performance, as Vice Presidential nominee who is victim of a smear campaign, may well garner her a third Oscar nomination, though it is not exactly a priority in the acclaimed actor's life. Allen spoke to Paul Fischer during last month's Toronto Film Festival.
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Allen's festival appearance – she'll be interviewed onstage by director Sally Potter – is followed by a screening of Potter's Yes, which stars Allen as "She," a married scientist who embarks on a continent-spanning affair with "He," a surgeon turned cook. While it's good to see Allen dipping into artier fare, her maternal instincts remain razor sharp, as anyone who saw this year's The Upside of Anger can attest. Allen's performance as a boozing, bitter, suddenly single mother of four daughters was searing enough to incite early-season Oscar talk. (She ... made an impression in the recent Off the Map, as a hippie mom who gardens in the buff.) But if Anger represents the most deliciously showy stop on Allen's mommy track, these highlights also deserve a second look. Admit it, you totally forgot she was in Face/Off, didn't you?
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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.
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Having cornered the market on woebegone, tortured wives, Allen (who had once played a motorcycle lesbian onstage in Lanford Wilson's "Balm in Gilead") began to break the mold of her typecasting in "Pleasantville" (1998). Though her June Cleaver-like black-and-white TV mom was certainly repressed, she shrugged off her shackles in color, discovering both art and sexuality. She rejoined "Pleasantville" co-star Jeff Daniels as a suburbanite couple in a brittle black comedy about guns, "It's the Rage" (1999), but finally left suburban housewifery behind with her turn as a slain Irish journalist Veronica Guerin in the fictionalized biopic "Though the Sky Falls", directed by John Mackenzie, and a potential US Vice President tainted by sexual scandal in Rod Lurie's "The Contender" (both 2000), a project which reunited her with Jeff Bridges and Christian Slater from "Tucker: The Man and His Dream", as well as William Petersen from "Manhunter." In 2002, Allen was nominated for an Emmy for her performance as Morgause in television miniseries "The Mists of Avalon." She made a most welcome return to the big screen in the effectively emotional adaptation of the best-selling novel "The Notebook" (2004) in a surprisingly complex and nuanced turn as Rachel McAdams' upper class mother who disapproves of her relationship with a sweet-natured but poor small town man. Next she was a cool, über-efficient CIA chief on the trail of the elusive Jason Bourne (Matt Damon) in the satisfying 2004 sequel "The Bourne Supremacy."
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Having cornered the market on woebegone, tortured wives, Allen (who had once played a motorcycle lesbian onstage in Lanford Wilson's "Balm in Gilead") began to break the mold of her typecasting in "Pleasantville" (1998). Though her June Cleaver-like black-and-white TV mom was certainly repressed, she shrugged off her shackles in color, discovering both art and sexuality. She rejoined "Pleasantville" co-star Jeff Daniels as a suburbanite couple in a brittle black comedy about guns, "It's the Rage" (1999), but finally left suburban housewifery behind with her turn as a slain Irish journalist Veronica Guerin in the fictionalized biopic "Though the Sky Falls", directed by John Mackenzie, and a potential US Vice President tainted by sexual scandal in Rod Lurie's "The Contender" (both 2000), a project which reunited her with Jeff Bridges and Christian Slater from "Tucker: The Man and His Dream", as well as William Petersen from "Manhunter." In 2002, Allen was nominated for an Emmy for her performance as Morgause in television miniseries "The Mists of Avalon." She made a most welcome return to the big screen in the effectively emotional adaptation of the best-selling novel "The Notebook" (2004) in a surprisingly complex and nuanced turn as Rachel McAdams' upper class mother who disapproves of her relationship with a sweet-natured but poor small town man. Next she was a cool, über-efficient CIA chief on the trail of the elusive Jason Bourne (Matt Damon) in the satisfying 2004 sequel "The Bourne Supremacy."
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On Broadway, Allen received a Tony Award for her performance opposite JohnMalkovich in Lanford Wilson's Burn This (1987), and was nominated inthe same category for The Heidi Chronicles (1989). Off-Broadway, shewon an Obie for her starring role in The Marriage of Bette & Boo. She reprised her Steppenwolf Theatre role in And A Nightingale Sang,receiving the Clarence Derwent, Drama Desk, Outer Critics Circle andTheatre World Awards.
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