An almost pathologically shy adolescent, Joan Allen found the courage to come out of her shell on stage. Theater allowed her to be outrageous, to express sorrow and anger, in short, to be anything but the good little Midwestern girl of her upbringing. While attending Eastern Illinois University, the tall, angular student somehow attracted the attention of the flamboyant John Malkovich who would later invite her to move to Chicago and join the now famous Steppenwolf Theatre Company's fledgling ensemble.

Biography:

 Working days as a secretary paid the rent while the nights belonged to Steppenwolf, and alongside the likes of Gary Sinise, John Mahoney, Terry Kinney and Laurie Metcalf (to say nothing of Malkovich), Allen developed a restrained acting style that enabled her to disappear into her parts. She has always possessed a genius for subtext, projecting so much more than what is on the printed page, and over the years quietly emerged as one of the most underrated actresses around.

After working her way through the plays of Wallace Shawn, Caryl Churchill, Athol Fugard and Anton Chekhov at Steppenwolf's home office, Allen went to NYC in a Steppenwolf production of C.P Taylor's "And a Nightingale Sang" (1983), acting opposite future husband Peter Friedman. She appeared in the Public Theatre presentation of Christopher Durang's "The Marriage of Bette and Boo" in 1985, and by the time she won a Tony for her Broadway debut opposite Malkovich in Lanford Wilson's "Burn This" (1987), her secretarial days were behind her. The following year she was back on the Great White Way with Friedman, playing the appealing feminist exemplar Heidi Holland in Wendy Wasserstein's Pulitzer Prize-winning "The Heidi Chronicles" (1988), garnering another Tony nomination. Recognition for her stage work had also opened the doors in Hollywood, and Allen made both her feature ("Compromising Positions") and TV (the NBC miniseries "Evergreen") debuts in 1985.

Allen's star rose gradually with memorable turns as a blind girl who surprisingly humanizes a killer in Michael Mann's underrated "Manhunter" (the first movie to introduce Hannibal Lecter) and as one of Kathleen Turner's high school friends in Francis Ford Coppola's "Peggy Sue Got Married" (both 1986). She also enjoyed high profile TV roles in the "American Playhouse" presentation of Arthur Miller's "All My Sons" (PBS, 1987) and the "Hallmark Hall of Fame" production "The Room Upstairs" (CBS, 1987) before finding her niche as a wife opposite the Bridges boys, Jeff in Coppola's "Tucker: The Man and His Dream" (1988) and Beau in the HBO film "Without Warning: The James Brady Story" (1991). She played Liam Neeson's ball and chain, the bitter and withered Zeena Frome, in "Ethan Frome" and the more sympathetic wife and mother of the young chess prodigy in "Searching for Bobby Fischer" (both 1993), but neither these nor lesser roles as mothers in "Josh and S.A.M." (also 1993) and "Mad Love" (1995) significantly elevated her standing.

Allen's breakthrough came with her eerily on-target performance as the long-suffering Pat in Oliver Stone's "Nixon" (also 1995), representing the last hope for honesty and true feeling in the White House. Not known as a women's director, Stone worked hard with the actress to achieve the character's humanity, and aided immensely by her striking resemblance to the former First Lady, Allen responded with a sympathetic, subtle turn, earning an Academy Award nomination as Best Supporting Actress. The conscience in "Nixon", she was once again the moral center of "The Crucible" (1996), garnering a second consecutive Oscar nod as Best Supporting Actress for her portrayal of Daniel Day-Lewis' unforgiving wife. Her spouse-heavy resume then landed her opposite John Travolta (as his unsuspecting wife) and Nicolas Cage in John Woo's summer smash "Face/Off" (1997), for which she indulged in her customary understatement, leaving the scenery-chewing to her high-salaried cohorts. She also received critical acclaim that year as Kevin Kline's estranged wife in "The Ice Storm", Ang Lee's stark, complex and moving look at American suburban mores in the 1970s.

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."

Next, Allen was uniformly praised for her convincing, edgy turn in writer-director Mike Binder's seriocomic "The Upside of Anger" (2005) playing an abandoned suburban wife who shares her dilemmas and dramas with her four daughters and an old family friend (Kevin Costner) who may have been the right man for her all along. In British filmmaker Sally Potter’s romantic drama, “Yes” (2005), Allen played a Belfast-born microbiologist married to a prominent British politician (Sam Neill). With a marriage plagued with quarreling and infidelity, she enterers into a passionate love affair with a Lebanese surgeon (Simon Abkarian) incognito in London as a restaurant cook. Vibrant and daring, “Yes” was both a love story and a political commentary on the pain and rage brought on by the conflict between the West and the Middle East. Some critics, however, were turned off by the dialogue spoken in iambic pentameter.

Facts:

Name: Joan Allen

Height: 5' 10

Sex: F

Nationality: American

Birth Date: August 20, 1956

Birth Place: Rochelle, Illinois, USA

Profession: actress

Education: Rochelle Township High School   Eastern Illinois University in Charleston, Illinois (majored in Theatre)   Northern Illinois University (from 1976 through 1978)

Husband/Wife: Peter Friedman (actor, married on January 1, 1990)

Father: Jeff Allen (gas station operator)

Daughter: Sadie Friedman (born in March 1994)

Claim to fame: as the long-suffering Pat Nixon in Oliver Stone's Nixon (1995)