Karen Allen
Karen Allen
Karen Jane Allenis an American actress. She played Marion Ravenwood in Raiders of the Lost Arkand Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Allen has also had roles in films such as National Lampoon's Animal House, The Wanderers, Cruising, Shoot the Moon, Starman, Scrooged, The Sandlot, The Perfect Stormand Poster Boy...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionMovie Actress
Date of Birth5 October 1951
CityCarrolton, IL
CountryUnited States of America
Eventually you love people - friends or lovers - because of their flaws.
I've always done things the hard way. I was born like a piece of tangled yarn. The job is trying to untangle it, and I'll probably go on doing it for the rest of my life.
CGI is to me like watching a cartoon. It can be effective, if it's done well. A lot of times you don't feel any real risk. You're watching a bunch of computer-generated graphics.
The secrecy thing has gotten to be more and more prevalent in films, and maybe that's good. It's nice to go see a film and not know anything about it. Sometimes I feel like we know too much about films.
There's something so wonderful about being an actor in New York.
I watch many, many, many independent films every year that you see once in a film festival and they're never heard of ever again. Many of them are very, very good.
When independent films break through and actually make it into any level of mainstream-ness or get seen by people or find a life actually in theaters, it's extraordinary. And it doesn't happen that often.
I have to say from an actor's perspective, to work with a director who has been an actor through most of their career is a pleasure. They generally have a very deep understanding of the process of what you're doing, of how you are building and exploring the character.
I'm always surprised when people say, "Oh, it got such mixed reviews." I guess I didn't read them.
As actors, the magic is in the almost spiritual experience to really enter another world, to really enter a belief of being in another person's shoes and to really take on their experiences as someone else has written them and imagined them. It's kind of a sacred thing. It's a very spiritual experience. That in itself for me is the main thing that keeps me coming back to it. I like to travel, but for me, this is the greatest travel.
I try to offer as much as I can to the director so he has as much to work with as possible to create the character that, really, he wants to create in a sense.
When I read a film script, I kind of see it in my head and I see the moments that shape what I understand the character to be. There's very little time for rehearsal.
In the theater, actors are the essential element of the work. In a film, it's a real collaboration - not that theater isn't, because it is - but it's a collaboration to such an extent that you can give a performance in film that sometimes you look at and you go, "Well, that's not the performance I was trying to give at all."
I think that there is a real beauty to the live aspect of the theater, and the working with a director for a month on a script in the isolation of a room and really deeply delving into who are these people, what is the story we're telling, how do we want to tell it?