Karen Allen – Risk Taker
Written By: Michael D. McClellan | We all crave the familiar. There is something tranquil and comforting about our own routines, whoever we are, wherever we live, whatever they may be. That’s how we as humans are wired. Take French-American artist Louise Bourgeois, for example. Turns out that the immensely creative Bourgeois was “very habitual,” according to her longtime assistant Jerry Gorovoy. Each morning, the artist woke up and drank a cup of tea “with some jelly straight out of the jar,” Gorovoy recalls. Afterwards, he explains, “she’d have a bit of a sugar high and be ready to roll.” Gorovoy picked her up from her Chelsea row house every morning at 10 a.m., and together, the pair would drive to her Brooklyn studio, a former blue jeans factory (it was later torn down to make room for the Barclays Center). This routine was so entrenched that Bourgeois created an artwork entitled 10 am is When You Come to Me (2006), featuring tracings of her and Gorovoy’s hands.
Or consider former sharp-shooter Ray Allen, ten times an NBA All-Star and one of the greatest three-point shooters of all time, who was also known around the league for his meticulously shaved head, the way his jersey was carefully tucked into his shorts, and the way his socks were always pulled up to precisely the same length. His pregame ritual did not waver: A nap from 11:30 a.m. until 1 p.m., a meal of chicken and white rice at 2:30, an arrival time at the gym at precisely 3:45 to stretch. Allen would shave his head, then walk out to the court at exactly 4:30, where he would will methodically take shots from both baselines, both elbows, and the top of the key.
Karen Allen’s character in Colewell, Nora, is no different. She craves the sameness that she’s enjoyed for the past 35 years – coming to work as a postal clerk living in the rural backwoods town of Colewell, Pennsylvania. Employed at the core of the town’s social hub, Nora follows her own daily routine of making coffee, feeding her chickens, cooking eggs, and opening the post office that she oversees – which is located, conveniently, in her own house. All of that changes when the government decides to shut down the post office in Colewell, forcing an aging Nora to make the gut-wrenching decision to either retire or relocate. Nora’s sameness will never be the same. The inevitability of life intrudes, and she is confronted with the inescapable truth that, if we live long enough, the world in which we know it slowly dissolves away. A widow, Nora has already experienced the sorrow of losing one constant in her life. Now, she fearfully contemplates losing another. Her own mortality comes into stark relief, and with it the hint of loneliness and isolation that awaits us all.
Colewell is, in many ways, one of Karen Allen’s finest films. Contemplative, her longing stare extends beyond the nearby fields and into the past, the wistful sorrow in her eyes filled with memories either incomplete, unfulfilled, or just out of reach. Her masterfully understated performance captures the bittersweet longing for what once had been.
Allen, of course, has been making movies for a long time. Her big screen debut was National Lampoon’s Animal House, and just a few short years later she was starring opposite Harrison Ford in Raiders of the Lost Ark. What many people don’t realize is the unconventional path taken to get there. Allen, still a teenager, moved to New York in the early 1970s to study design, only to bounce back to Washington, D.C., where she got her first real taste of theatre. It was love at first sight. She returned to New York determined to become an actor, landing the role of Katy in Animal House after responding to an ad tacked to a bulletin board in the lobby of the Lee Strasberg Institute. In the blink of an eye she was auditioning for John Landis. Soon she was on the set with John Belushi, Kevin Bacon, and Tim Matheson. Animal House became a smash hit, and the previously obscure Allen was suddenly in demand.
(Photo Credit: Paramount Pictures)
Raiders of the Lost Ark only amped up the buzz. Playing Marion Ravenwood, Indiana Jones’s jilted love interest, Allen more than held her own onscreen with the charismatic Ford, validating Steven Spielberg’s choice of her for the part. Raiders would become one of the greatest films of all time, launching a franchise that includes 2008’s Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Allen, absent from both Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, reappeared in the fourth film, her onscreen chemistry with Harrison Ford intact and as sharp as ever.
Allen’s career has moved seamlessly from film to theatre and back again. She has acted with such luminaries as Al Pacino, Jeff Bridges, Bill Murray, John Malkovich, and Joanne Woodward. She has appeared in a beloved Christmas movie (Scrooged), a classic kids comedy (The Sandlot), and appeared in a total of four films that have been selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.” She has several more films in the works, and she continues to operate Karen Allen Fiber Arts, a celebration of beautiful and unique clothing collections from France, England, Japan, Spain, India, Argentina, Australia, Italy, and many designers from all over the United States. Karen’s own cashmere knitwear line, which is produced in her studio in Great Barrington (MA), features knitted garments in natural fibers; silk, cotton, wool, linen, and cashmere. She works with extraordinary embroidery artists, dye artists, and designers who experiment with fashion, fiber, and form, bringing her back full circle to her love of design.
All of which proves that Karen Allen is still at it.
She craves her routines just like Louise Bourgeois, Ray Allen, and her indelible character in Colewell, but she’s still a risk taker at heart.
Your current project, Colewell, is a tremendous film.
Thank you! Colewell is a small indie film that has been getting amazing responses from audiences and critics alike. It’s the work of a wonderful young director named Tom Quinn, who sought me out and got the script to me. We sat down and talked; he showed me a feature he made for something around $10,000. He was nominated for a Gotham Award for the film, it is called The New Year Parade (2008). He sent it to me, I looked at it, and loved it. I loved even more that he made it for $10,000! He is also a film professor at Drexel University in Philadelphia. He’s just a terrific guy and a wonderful writer. It’s a very lovely film.
Please tell me about it.
Colewell takes place in a little town in Pennsylvania, and I play a postmaster named Nora. When the USPS decides to close her office, she must choose whether to relocate for a new position or face retirement in Colewell. There are a lot of these small towns in the United States that are mostly elderly; places where young people have grown up, gone off, and are not coming back. The federal government has been going into these towns, taking their zip code, taking their post office, and erasing them off maps. Now these towns don’t exist anymore and get incorporated into larger towns. Often in towns like that, the post office is kind of a social and spiritual center for the town; it is a place where everyone meets and catches up with each other. Some of these towns have been around for hundreds of years, and now, suddenly, in theory, do not exist anymore.
It’s not just about the town losing its identity, it’s really about my character not only losing her job, but losing her identity in the sense because she has been at the center of the town through the post office. It’s a very human film, in that it explores loneliness and the dilemma people face when having to let go of something they’ve done their whole life. I read the script and fell in love with it. I felt it was really a beautifully realized piece of writing.
Colewell received two well-deserved Independent Spirit Award nominations, including your nomination for Best Female Lead.
Thank you again! I’m very proud of this film. It just wrapped up its film festival year and won Best Film in a number of those festivals. In February I went to Los Angeles to represent Colewell at the Independent Spirit Awards, where we were also nominated for John Cassavetes Award, which is presented to the creative team of a film budgeted at less than $500,000. The award ceremony was held the night before the Academy Awards, which made for a wonderful experience.
Where can we see Colewell.
I’m very glad you asked. It is available on both Amazon and iTunes.
Your life story is fascinating. Please take me back to the beginning.
We moved around quite a bit when I was growing up, so I have a lot of memories of moving to a new state, or into a new neighborhood, or into a new house, or going to a new school. As a child, it was something that I found both exciting and also a bit daunting. At one point we lived just outside of Pittsburgh, in a town called Castle Shannon, and I have wonderful memories of that area. The countryside was beautiful. I was eight or nine at the time, and I remember it being a period of safety in relation to the world. I’m sure you’ve heard all of those old tales of walking a mile to school; well, I actually did walk a mile to school – through orchards, over rolling hills, and across a little, cobbled bridge. It used to snow so much there that my mom used to tie our boots onto our legs with rope [laughs]. I found this environment both very intriguing and very beautiful, very much like something you might find in a storybook. It’s funny, but I always felt less connected when we lived in the suburbs, and much more connected when we lived either in the city or in the countryside. That remains true for me today. I am either much happier in the complete chaos of the city, with people to the left of me and people to the right of me, or way out in the middle of the country where it’s just me and the trees, the birds, and the grass.
You were the middle child. What was that like?
I think having sisters definitely helped with all of the moving around. We were constantly moving into new places where we didn’t know anyone, but we at least had each other to lean on for support. I was very close to my younger sister, who I am still very close to today. I’m close to my older sister as well, but that may not have been quite the case when we were growing up. I think that the age difference played a factor: I was four years old when my younger sister was born, so I was quite delighted to have her come along, but I was less than two years younger than my older sister, so there was a natural sibling rivalry that developed. It’s a fascinating thing, the age in which one has to give up one’s sovereignty as a child, but because we were close in age we were often in the same schools, which was very helpful. There was comfort in the fact that we didn’t have to go into a new school where we didn’t know anyone.
Your father worked for the FBI.
We were never really allowed to speak of my dad’s work. I don’t know at what point in my life that I learned that he worked for the FBI; we were always told that he worked for the Department of Justice. At some point we came to the realization that he worked for the FBI, but we weren’t allowed to tell anyone about it. It was all very hush-hush.
At age 17, you moved to New York City to attend the Fashion Institute of Technology. What drew you to FIT?
Growing up, I developed an absolute love of textiles, whether that was fabrics or yarns or rugs or things that had been woven. I was very, very fascinated by anything that had a pattern or a texture. I used to call it my first ecstasy [laughs]. I remember as a child, I would stand in the doorway of a store that had beautifully woven fabrics, and I would be so excited by the colors that were being used in so many wonderful ways. My heart would literally pound in my chest. My grandmother was also a big knitter. She lived in Southern Illinois, and we spent all of our summers there – that was how we spent our vacations. She taught me to knit when I was very young, and that was really how I got interested in design, and one of the big reasons that I decided to attend the Fashion Institute of Technology.
What was your time like at FIT, and in the years immediately after?
When I went to the Fashion Institute of Technology, I didn’t really know what kind of design that I wanted to do yet, but I was drawn most strongly to knitwear design. I studied there for two years in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. Back then the school only offered a two-year program, and it was much, much smaller than that it is now. There was so much going on in the world at the time – Woodstock, the Vietnam War, man going to the moon – and most of the women coming out of the programs at FIT were going into big design companies and starting out as gophers, fetching coffee for people, and I was not sure that I had gone in the right direction. So, I came back to Maryland where my parents were living and I got an apartment with an old school friend, and I worked for a year as a buyer for a clothing store.
That’s when I decided that I wanted to travel. I had been meticulously saving money during that year, so I quit my job and took the year off. I traveled to Jamaica and the West Indies first, and then went down to Mexico City and met up with two friends. We drove the Interoceanic Highway from Mexico City to Southern Peru, down through Central America, then into Columbia and through Ecuador. We actually had to put the car on a boat when we got to Panama [laughs]. That entire year was so fascinating. I really got to know myself in a way that you just can’t when you are locked into everyday life and the world around you is trying to tell you who you are and what you should be doing with your life. So that year of travel was a very liberating experience for me.
Did the travel inspire your creative side?
I certainly saw a lot of extraordinary textiles while I was traveling, but at the time I don’t think I was very focused on that. I was really at a place where most twenty-year-old find themselves, and that was trying to figure out what I was meant to do with my life. I really didn’t know what I wanted. If anything, I think at the time that I fancied myself as a writer. I remember reading a lot of really wonderful South American writers and being very inspired by them. That was the whole period of surrealist writing down there, and I was quite taken by it, so I started to write and imagined myself going in that direction. I also lugged a guitar around with me during that period, and I tried to teach myself how to play. I wrote songs, and thought that maybe I’d go on to become a singer-songwriter, which of course was something that was all around me at the time. I was very inspired by a lot of the songwriters of the ‘70s – Joni Mitchell, Bonnie Raitt, Bob Dylan, Neil Young, and on and on. So in a way, it was like an artist searching for their medium. I really didn’t know in what way my creativity was going to find itself fulfilled.
After your year of travel, you returned to Washington, DC in 1972. That’s when something happened that changed your life.
A friend of mine took me to see the Polish Theatre Laboratory, which was, unbeknownst to me, the most famous theatre company in the world at the time. Jerzy Grotowski was its director. He had written a book called Towards a Poor Theatre, which was really a treatise against theatre having become so encumbered and expensive, and an indictment on the theatre for sacrificing quality in favor of showmanship. Back then there so many big productions, which had become the commercial theatre of the ‘60s and early ‘70s – a lot of razzmatazz, a big set with pieces moving, all that kind of stuff. Grotowski created a theatre experience where there was no scenery. It was all about the acting, and he called his actors “acrobats of the soul.” Well, I was taken to see six actors perform in Grotowski’s Apocalypsis Cum Figuris, and it just blew my mind. It was all in Polish and I didn’t understand a single word, but what they were saying and doing transcended language. I literally went in one person and came out a different person – it changed me in about a period of two hours – and I walked out feeling as if I’d found a direction that I wanted to move in. There was no explaining it. I didn’t know how, or why, or any of those things, I just instinctively knew that that that’s what I had to do. That was the beginning of me heading off in a whole new direction. That was probably 1972.
You attended George Washington University at this time, but it sounds like Grotowski’s influence proved to be pretty powerful stuff.
I started studying acting with a friend of mine who had worked with a director in Poland, and who had come back to Washington, DC and had started his own theater company. It was an experimental company, The Washington Theatre Laboratory. At that point my whole life shifted over to the theatre. The funny thing is, I had never been interested in theatre growing up. I never went to watch the plays in school. I always was intimidated by the kids in junior high school and high school who fancied themselves actors. I found them too extroverted for me. I was always a little scared of them – they just seemed way too out there [laughs]. Suddenly, all of that changed. I became very, very interested in acting, and in the potential that acting had to connect with people, to find this commonality and universality with people.
Grotowski passed away way too young, as did most of his actors. The film My Dinner with Andre is about Grotowski and his actors. It’s Andre Gregory and Wallace Shawn sitting and talking for hours about their experience with Grotowski. He changed a lot of people’s perceptions of what theatre could be, and I was lucky enough to be one of them.
Your love of the theatre continues to this day.
I have been very passionate about the theatre from the moment I saw Grotowski’s play, and theatre continues to be a very important part of my life. Today I do a lot of theatre directing. I still work as an actor in the theatre if there is something interesting that comes along, but I find it much more compelling to work on plays that don’t have a role in them for me. That allows me to work with the actors purely from the director’s viewpoint.
How big a leap is it to go from acting to directing?
When you’re an actor, you are very much limited by the material, whether that’s acting in a play or in a film. Your entire focus is on the role that you are playing, and on giving the most authentic performance for that role. For me, the move into directing is so liberating because it opens up a much larger world to which I can fall in love with. I can work on plays and films, and I get to put my fingerprints on the entirety of the finished product. I just directed a film where there was no role in it for me, but I just absolutely loved working on it.
In 1977, you moved back to New York.
I had just spent three-and-a-half years working with the Washington Theatre Laboratory doing plays, so I had the beginnings of an understanding of myself as an actor. I was very committed to the pursuit of an acting career by this point, so when I returned to New York I really wanted to study with people who had a different approach. While I felt that the Grotowski training was fascinating and extremely beneficial, I had been immersed in it for a long period of time and I wanted to have a larger vocabulary, in a sense. I studied at the Lee Strasberg Institute, and I studied with Stella Adler, both of them were very, very well-respected acting teachers at the time.
I went to New York with the mindset that I would not only study, but that I would also look for work. At the time there were a couple of free publications that came out every day or every week, and you could look in those and see the upcoming audition schedule for roles in film, television, and stage. One of the publications was called Backstage. Actors very rarely got jobs by responding to a Backstage ad, but for me it was all part of the process. I was naïve and still learning. I knew nothing about agents. I knew nothing about unions. It was really a whole new world.
You weren’t in New York for very long when you were cast to play in your first movie – a little film called National Lampoon’s Animal House.
I had only been in New York for five months before I got cast in Animal House. This was just extraordinary for a studio film, but it was really a case of being in the right place at the right time, and paying attention to what was going on around me. There was a bulletin board in the lobby of the Lee Strasberg Institute, and as I walked past it one day I happened to notice an announcement thumb-tacked to it. It said that college-age actors and actresses were being cast in a feature film, and that anyone interested should send in a picture and a resumé. Well, I jotted it down, popped a photo and a resumé into an envelope, and sent it off. Just like that, a couple days later I got a call and they wanted to meet me. The fascinating thing about this story is that when I met the casting director, she said that she had put the announcement on the board herself, and that while it had been up there for about two weeks, I was one of about three or four people who responded to it. There must have been hundreds of actors walking past that bulletin board every day. People either didn’t see it, or didn’t believe it, or didn’t follow through and submit the requested material for whatever reason. So getting the role in Animal House was a little bit of a lucky fluke. For it to go on to be so successful was unheard of in terms of someone’s first film, but I was fortunate in that way.
(Photo Credit: Universal Pictures)
What was it like to audition for Animal House?
I had to audition five or six times. The executives at Universal wanted someone with more experience, so they didn’t really want me because I had never been in a film before. Thankfully, John Landis came to New York in search of actors and he really championed me for the part. They flew me to Los Angeles, where I auditioned in front of the people from Universal, and they eventually decided to give me a try. It helped that most of the actors in Animal House had never done a film before, which meant that I wasn’t alone when it came to acting experience. That helped me to feel less intimidated – and less nervous – doing something like this for the first time, because I honestly didn’t know anybody else in the film.
You truly were a newbie to the acting game.
I was truly innocent coming into all of this. Until I did Animal House, I had never met anyone who had worked in a film before. In fact, I’d never met a single person who’d ever had anything to do with making a film. I had no experience. I had no expectations. People often ask me if I knew what a huge hit this film was going to be. I knew nothing. I knew nothing about reading a script, and how the shorthand of the script compared to reading a play or a novel. I was learning by the seat of the pants, as they say.
(Photo Credit: Universal Pictures)
What did your parents and sisters think when they learned that you were going to be in a feature film?
My sisters were pretty relaxed about everything, but my parents were very apprehensive about this idea that I wanted to be an actor. They had never met a professional actor in their lives. They were certainly more traditional, and they subscribed to the conventional wisdom that you just didn’t suddenly decide to do stuff like that. In their minds, if you weren’t born into that world, or if you weren’t of that world, then you could never really break into that world. They used to quote me all kinds of statistics about how many unemployed actors there were, but when they saw Animal House it was a real turning point for them. I think a lot of parents have trepidation when their children enter a world they’re not familiar with, which my parents weren’t when it came to acting. But everything really changed for them after they saw me in a professionally made film.
Those first five or six years after I started to work professionally were fun, because my parents got such a huge kick out of it. They enjoyed seeing the films that I was doing, and also seeing me in plays. They came to the Kennedy Center to watch me perform in a play. I got to invite them to Broadway. They came to London when I was shooting Raiders of the Lost Ark, and every day after my driver would take me to the studio to shoot, he would go back to the hotel and pick them up. They got to do all of the touristy things like visit Winchester Cathedral, so their world started to expand a lot through my experiences.
(Photo Credit: Universal Pictures)
After making several movies in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, you decided to shift your focus back to the theatre.
I did Animal House, The Wanderers, Shoot the Moon, and Raiders of the Lost Ark, and then I went back and acted in Monday After the Miracle. I had been away from the theatre for nearly four years. I think a lot of actors develop an anxiety when they are away from the theatre for too long, primarily because they don’t want to lose their chops, so to speak. So I was quite eager to go back and work on the stage.
How did you land the role of Helen Keller?
The summer that Raiders of the Lost Ark came out, I got cast in a Bill Gibson play called Two for the Seesaw, and I played the role that Anne Bancroft had created on Broadway. Well, Bill Gibson also wrote The Miracle Worker, and then Monday After the Miracle. He got very interested in me playing the adult Helen Keller, which I ended up working on for two years. Arthur Penn was the director, and it also starred Jane Alexander. We did it in four different theaters on the way to taking it to Broadway.
The New York Times wrote that “Most impressive is Miss Allen, who captures Helen’s disembodied voice, her unseeing eyes, and her courageous ability to overcome both physical handicaps and loneliness.”
It has been a long time since I played Helen Keller, but it was great to be a part of something well-received. As an actor, all you can do is give yourself entirely to the role and hope that it translates into something the audience connects with. If you do that, then you’ve succeeded regardless of what a critic might think.
Actors have differing opinions when it comes to reviews. What’s your take?
I can’t help but have some interest as to how people are viewing a play that I’m either directing or performing in, but I’ve gotten to a point where I don’t read reviews while I am still doing a play because that feedback can really get in the way. Instead, I’ll have someone save the reviews for me to read after the play has finished its run, which ensures that I won’t be influenced by someone viewing the work from the outside. That’s important to me because, in a play, you do have the ability to change your performance based on feedback from the critics. Film is different. The film is done by the time the reviews come out, so there’s nothing you can do to go back and change it. Of course, everyone loves to read fantastic reviews about something they’ve worked on, but it’s better for me to stay focused on the work and not get too caught up in how people respond to it.
Let’s talk about Raiders of the Lost Ark. How did you land the role of Marion Ravenwood?
I met with Steven Spielberg in New York. They didn’t have a script for Raiders yet – either that, or they weren’t sharing with the actors at that point – so I went in and met him without knowing what the film was about, or anything about the character. We chatted for about fifteen minutes, and seemed to hit it off. He was friends with John Landis and a guy named Rob Cohan, who had directed me in a film called A Small Circle of Friends, which was shot in Boston just the year before. I think Steve had seen both films and he was legitimately interested in me playing Marion Ravenwood, along with a lot of other actresses that he was meeting with and screen testing, so he had me come to Los Angeles. I flew out there with a John Shea, who is a wonderful actor in New York. We auditioned together.
“Raiders of the Lost Ark” (1981)
As hard as it is to believe now, Harrison Ford wasn’t the original choice to play Indiana Jones.
They cast me as Marion without having an Indiana Jones yet, and they were still looking around and trying to figure out who that would be. Tim Matheson auditioned for the role of Indiana Jones while I was out there. They also had screen tests with everyone from Peter Coyote to Tom Selleck, and eventually decided that Tom Selleck was perfect for the lead role. As it turns out, Tom had already shot a pilot for Magnum P.I., and if CBS decided to pick it up they had him locked into a seven-year contract. Steven and George [Lucas] waited as long as they could, but the network refused to let Tom out of his contract so they had to move on. He was heartbroken about it, and remain so to this day.
As for Harrison, he had already appeared in two of George’s films, American Graffiti and Star Wars, and he was reprising his role as Hans Solo in The Empire Strikes Back. Maybe they thought it would be hard for him to be cast as the lead in two such prominent film franchises, because, in both cases, they had planned on shooting sequels from the very beginning. So I think they had some reasonable hesitations, but in the end they decided they were going to work with Harrison, and it worked out pretty well. Not only was he a wonderful Indiana Jones, he was able to create and sustain Han Solo, and he was also able to create and sustain Indiana Jones simultaneously.
What was it like acting with Harrison?
In the first film, Raiders of the Lost Ark, he had a way of working that was foreign to me in a lot of ways. We worked very separately in preparing for our roles and rehearsing for the scenes we shared. I had gotten my start as an actor in the theatre, so I was very used to collaborating with my fellow actors. Film is a much more isolated situation, and I don’t think I really even understood that yet. Often you work on your character in isolation. People are flying in and out, and there are times when you don’t meet the actor you’re going to do a scene with until the morning you’re going to do it. It’s just different in that respect. With regards to Harrison, I think we approached the film with having very different ways of working.
In Raiders, because the characters haven’t seen each other for a very long time, she’s furious at him when he walks in the door, and in some respects I think we allowed the story that was written to affect our relationship in the first film. We worked a lot together as the characters, and the chemistry was definitely there on the screen. It was magical, but when it was over I felt like I didn’t really get to know him that well. And I think that’s common. A lot of times people do think that actors are all close friends away from the set, but you can work very intensely with another actor, and then you can both live outside of the work in very individual, separate ways. That was the case with us. I get along great with Harrison, and we have great working chemistry, but it’s hard to socialize when I live on the East Coast and he lives in Montana.
Do you ever stop and reflect on the significance of the film?
The staying power of Raiders of the Lost Ark is incredible. It’s a film that has grown in popularity as generations of parents have shown it to their sons and daughters, and as others have discovered it on their own or through their friends. That’s just not true with most films. Most films have their moment in the sun and they fall away to be discovered in a video store, or now online, or however people find films today. This film has stayed very relevant through the years, not unlike Star Wars.
You reprised your role as Marion in the Kingdom of the Crystal skull. What was different the second time around?
The biggest thing is that we were all very different people. We were 25 years older, and we’d all had kids and families. I feel as though all of us – George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, Kathleen Kennedy, Harrison, myself – came back together with a real sense of joy. There was a sense that we’d made this amazing film together all those years ago, one that had become such an important part of popular culture, so we wanted to come together and honor it with the best performances possible.
I also think it was easier the second time around. I think we had a clearer sense of what kind of style film we were making. With Harrison having already put Indiana Jones into three films already, I’m sure that he was very comfortable stepping back into those shoes and putting back on that hat. For me, part of the learning curve in the first film was actually trying to figure it out. I remember reading the script, and I thought that Raiders of the Lost Ark was a terrible title [laughs]. I don’t think I fully understood what the style of the film would be, and I sort of imagined it more like Casablanca. I hadn’t seen those Saturday matinee films on which Raiders was based because they were a little bit before my time. Steven Spielberg, who directed it, along with George Lucas, Larry Kasden and Philip Kaufman, who wrote Raiders, were all really celebrating the films that they had grown up with. I didn’t have that vocabulary. I didn’t really know what those films were like, or what the style of them was, so it was easier coming back the second time because we had created a style for those films. I already knew and liked everybody, and had already done something very successful with them in the past, so that was just a great starting off point for this film.
Let’s jump back to the theatre and talk about The Glass Menagerie – what was it like working onstage with Joanne Woodward?
Fantastic! I had already done the play with her at the Williamstown Theatre Festival up in Williamstown, Massachusetts, which is a very famous summer theatre festival. It was during this time that Arvin Brown, who was running the Longwharf Theatre, asked if we wanted to take it there, which we did. It was an easy decision on my part, because Joanne has always been one of my very favorite actresses. It was an absolute joy and privilege to work with her, to share a dressing room with her, to go through rehearsal with her, and to be out on stage with her. It was just extraordinary. I learned so much from Joanne just by being around her in those ways, and getting to watch the way she worked and observe the way she approached her character day after day. She kept things very present and very alive. I treasured every moment. I adore Joanne as an actress, and I adore her as a person. She’s just exceptional.
What was it like working with Paul Newman on the film The Glass Menagerie?
It was absolutely great. Paul was a wonderful actor himself, so he had the ability to work with his cast in a very supportive way. Everyone was very experienced with the material. John Malkovich was the new person coming into the cast, but he had done the play before, at the Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago, so it wasn’t like we were learning lines or trying to figure out relationships. Instead, we had an incredible opportunity to work on the internal parts of the characters that often there’s never enough time in film to really explore. We were given a whole month of rehearsal before the start of filming. Since we all already knew our roles from spending time with them in the theatre, we got to start from a place where actors often feel like they are ending. As a director, Paul allowed us to dig deep and explore our characters during that month before we started filming, so that was great. We had a wonderful time.
Please tell me about Karen Allen Fiber Arts.
I think that I had always had something like this in the back of my mind, even when I left the design world behind when I left FIT in the ‘70s, because I had continued working in the knitwear design through the years. It was just one of the things I did on the side, and so it remained a real constant in my life. I always loved the thought of starting a small knitwear company.
When did you decide to make the leap into knitwear?
I was living with my young son in New York City when 9-11 happened. We stayed another two years after that, but it was a difficult time in New York. There wasn’t really a lot of work, and my son was at an age at which I didn’t want to pull him out of school and take him on the road to live in hotels and be tutored outside of a classroom setting. So the timing was right for a change. I needed to make the shift in focus so that I could provide a really strong support system for the next to seven or eight years, as he matured and finished high school. I didn’t feel that I could make it work in New York, even though he was studying two musical instruments and going to school in New York at the time. I was holding onto this place in the countryside because I had a deep sentimental attachment to it, and I knew that I had to simplify my life. There were a couple of really great schools up there, so that’s when I decided to make the move to Great Barrington.
For someone whose primary work had been acting, what was it like to transition to entrepreneurship?
After moving, my first thought was, “Well, now what am I going to do? What can I create for myself so that I don’t feel deprived after having stepped back from my work as an actor?” That’s when I thought that it might be the perfect time to do something adventurous like start a knitwear company. It made perfect sense, because it would allow me to stay in one place while giving me something I’ve always wanted to do, and I wouldn’t feel sorry for myself because I no longer had the creative life I had as an actor.
How did you prepare to launch Karen Allen Fiber Arts?
I went back to FIT the last year we were in New York, and I studied Japanese knitting machines. I learned how to work on them with the help of a wonderful teacher named Marian Grealish, who became sort of my mentor on these machines. I bought two of the machines and brought them up to Massachusetts and put them in a little outbuilding down the road from my house. I spent the next year just trying to figure out if I could make things on these machines that I considered to be breathtaking.
You’ve certainly done that.
Thank you. I really started out not being sure. The machines, when used in an orthodox way, are capable of producing pieces that are to be admired, but the conventional approach just wasn’t interesting to me. That’s when I started using them in ways that they’re not ordinarily used. The results were very promising, and everything gained momentum from there. I created a line of knitwear – scarves, hats, gloves, sweaters, shawls – and I showed them at a gallery. People were very enthusiastic about the pieces, so I decided to open a little store that not only carried the things that I was making, but also carry pieces by other designers as well.
What excites you most about working with other designers?
I’ve always been a real lover of other people’s textiles. There are some amazing textile designers out there, from all over the world. I thought that it would be a great idea to invite my favorite designers to display and sell their pieces in my store. And because they are small studio designers working individually with very small group of people, the pieces were complimentary to the work that I was already doing. Our focus is on an artistic approach design and quality. There is nothing about us that is about mass market production.
In what ways have you grown since opening in 2004?
I started with about thirty designers in a little, tiny store in Great Barrington. Since then we’ve moved across the road to a larger store and we are now working with 80 designers from all over the world. It’s still not a large store in terms of its physical size – it’s maybe 1,000 square feet – but it really represents everything textile when you walk in the door. I look around in the store and I just get so inspired by people’s work what they’re doing.
What is your philosophy on life? And if you could offer a piece of advice to others, what would that be?
I’m a student of Buddhism. There is something called Right Livelihood, in which you find the right thing that you are meant to do, and then you find a way to do it reasonably successfully, so that you can actually support yourself by doing something that you love. I think that’s when one’s life really comes into tune. That doesn’t mean that you aren’t going to have terrible ups and downs like everyone else, and that you’re not going to have successes and failures. Those are part of the rhythm of life. But being able to support yourself doing what you love, there is a tremendous fulfillment in that pursuit.
Also, I would just say to not be in a hurry. Give yourself the time and the space you need to figure out what you are good at and what you can do in your life to not only make a contribution to the world, but to also fulfill that hungry heart that we all have. Today I see people getting so anxious about what they’re going to do with their lives. I know we live in a world that is much more difficult than the world that I grew up in, but just to give yourself the space and time to discover who you truly are and to let yourself find fulfillment in what you do with your life.
- Mario Andretti – Full Throttle - February 4, 2024
- Tim Russ – Star Trek: Voyager - July 25, 2021
- Maeve Press – Everything’s Gonna Be Okay - May 23, 2021
