Joan Allen was born August 20, 1956 in Rochelle, Illinois. Her father was a gas station owner, her mother a homemaker. Attending Rochelle Township High School, Allen later described herself as “shy but desperate to meet boys.” Her sister suggested Allen try out for the cheerleading team. She was not accepted. Allen auditioned for a play instead and won a part. “I think the cheerleading thing was a way of performing. There was the boy element, but more important was the performance element. Once I got to high school and auditioned for a play and got in, I thought this was really what I was looking for.” The left-handed Allen was also an honor roll student and “played the cello badly.”

Following her sister to Eastern Illinois University, Allen met a drama student named John Malkovich. After he graduated, Malkovich launched the Steppenwolf Theatre Company, performing plays in a church basement on the northside of Chicago. When Allen transferred to Northern Illinois University her junior year, Malkovich asked her to join the group. She accepted, and found less inclination to finish school, dropping out a few credits short of a degree. Allen found work as a secretary while performing with Steppenwolf. When their production of And A Nightingale Sang opened on Broadway in 1983, Allen landed an agent, who sent her on auditions for TV and film.

Allen credited her career to John Malkovich. “I can’t think what I would have done if I hadn’t met him. I wasn’t one of those kids who was like, ‘Get me to New York. Get me to a big city.’ I was always much more shy. All I knew was that I loved to act. But I don’t know about the other part of it. I’m not sure I had the chutzpah to go and prove yourself.” Allen won small parts in Compromising Positions and Peggy Sue Got Married. In 1985, Michael Mann cast her in the pivotal supporting role of a blind woman who unknowingly becomes drawn to a serial killer in Manhunter. Roles as wife and mother in Tucker: The Man and His Dream and Searching For Bobby Fischer followed, but Allen’s greatest success remained on stage, where she won a Tony Award for the 1987 production Burn This.

In 1995 - once her peers in Hollywood got a look at her performance as Pat Nixon in Nixon - Allen was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. She shot to the top of casting lists, playing the wife of John Travolta in Face/Off, Kevin Kline in The Ice Storm and William H. Macy in Pleasantville. Film critic Rod Lurie, who wanted to be a filmmaker, also took notice. With Allen in mind, Lurie wrote a script about a female vice presidential candidate whose sex life becomes public debate. Released in 2000, The Contender resulted in Allen’s third Oscar nomination in a five year span, this time for Best Actress.

Currently a single parent raising a daughter born in 1994, Allen has focused on film and TV work for the last fifteen years. Her eclectic taste has led to roles as a lovably bitter alcoholic in The Upside of Anger (2005), Rachel McAdams’ interfering mother in The Notebook (2004), a benevolent spymaster in The Bourne Supremacy (2004) and The Bourne Ultimatum (2007), a sorceress in TNT’s mini-series The Mists of Avalon (2001), and martyred Irish journalist Veronica Guerin in When the Sky Falls (2000). She hosted Saturday Night Live in November 1998, performing sketches with Will Ferrell and Ana Gasteyer, and has been a presenter at the Tony Awards.

Allen has spent several years trying to set up a film called Pushers Needed, about working class women in Dublin who push wheelchairs for the cripples going to Lords. Despite interest from Claire Daines, Kathy Bates and Maggie Smith to fill the cast, Allen has been unable to secure financing. When asked in an interview about her status as a movie star, Allen was demure: “I’m hard to pin down. I tend to look different in films. But I just live my life. I get on the bus, I get on the subway, it’s not a problem. I think of myself more as a character actor than that ingénue leading lady, who started out something like Michelle Pfeiffer, or Jessica Lange. I’m a bit quirkier than that.”

© Joe Valdez 

Photo courtesy of Wisdom Digital Media at Broadway World.com.

Mad props to Aaron Valdez for designing the United Federation of Character Actors shield.

[Photomontage courtesy LA Times]

Saving Grace Holly Hunter Promo Shot #4 - PH Jeff Riedel

I asked about what got her interested in doing a television show and about practical jokes and the fun they have on set.

Holly Hunter Interview - Saving Grace on TNT

Question: Do you feel like you character has changed at all since Earl has came into the picture and do you feel like his presence is effectively saving Grace?

Holly Hunter: I think you know, Earl’s presence is, I think he wants to give Grace peace. Uh, uh, I think you know that he feels some of the things she struggles with, he wishes she wouldn’t. I think, in the season Grace, Earl finds out a lot about her, you know. I think he, he’s a very close observer of her this season and kind of intimate with her really. Um, and that is, uh, revelatory to both him and her. I mean, they get to know each other better as human being and you know, um, entity, whatever Earl is. He says he’s an angel. Okay. Um, but I think they get to have more understanding about who the other is and I think uh, there are many things that he grows to admire about her, as this season progresses.

Question: I wanted to ask if, kind of going off that question. Will we see any changes in Grace now, between last season and this season?

Hunter: I think she changes all the time actually. I think that there’s give and take inside her. There’s always movement. She’s very kinetic and I think she’s also kinetic in a psychological way. Um, I mean, I would doubt, you know, I think that you know the way that she handles her nephew, for example, is something that changes very suddenly. You know, what she is honest with him about and what she withholds from him. Um, uh, but I think that there’s some distance that Grace covers towards, um, becoming closer with her family.

Question: What are some of your favorite things about playing this character?

Hunter: Uh, you know, I think, you know, probably the most thrilling thing about her, about how alive she is. You know, she’s truly, she’s truly alive in a way so many people are asleep, um, for long periods of time in their days and their lives. I think Grace spends an extraordinary amount of her time, really awake to possibilities and awake to a real true curiosity about why people do what they do. And, I think you know, she also is a real tester of what people are capable of and what she herself is capable of. This is one of the things that I believe attracts her about crime and attracts her about her job is she wants to understand why these people do what they do. And, she has (((inaudible))) and could imagine doing those things herself. You know, the things that the criminal mind is capable of thinking of. Uh, and that’s all so very interesting to her.

Question: I was wondering, uh, how much, uh, did the success of Kyra Sedgwick and The Closer have on you deciding to take on a television show yourself?

Hunter: Well, I think you know, what preceded that was the success of The Shield and Rescue Me and The Sopranos. Uh, I think really started the wild, wild west in cable. Uh, FX and HBO kind of started this new idea, which was real character driven drama. And, and, real drama that’s absolutely 100% fueled by character. And, a character who does uh, anti-heroic things, not a character who’s quirky, but a character who straddles um, you know, two worlds and one world being highly charged with questionable thoughts and behavior, such as Dennis Leary and Tony Soprano and Vic Mackey do. I mean, those characters live in a more similar vein to how Grace lives, except that Grace is a woman. And, I think that uh, you know that’s where cable has really kind of taken off. It’s given women opportunities to play, you know, highly controversial, uh, characters. Women who are doing things that maybe they wouldn’t have been able to do on television 10 years ago. Like, you know, uh, Weeds on Showtime or Glenn Close in Damages or Mini Driver in The Riches. Women who are doing, you know, who are living lives of real deep grayness

Question: I was just wondering with Grace, if you felt that she has, now that you’ve got a first season under your belt with her, taught you anything or that you learned something from her?

Hunter: I would love to be as alive as she is, you know. I mean, that’s a difficult thing to do. You know, like right now I’m definitely not as alive as Grace, cause I just spent a night working till six this morning being (inaudible), so it’s like Holly’s dragging. Oh man. Um, but, you know I, I think her generosity. I think so often Grace doesn’t think of herself. She so often doesn’t. She so often is thinking about how can I make this better, for this person in the way that she is capable of. In the way that she knows how and her skills are different from other people’s skills and her instincts for how to solve problems are different from other people. But, I think there’s something incredibly generous, incredibly pure about her intent. What her intentions are. I think are really beautiful.

Question: The difference in the workload of doing a feature film or TV film with the series, having done a year of the series. Are you easing into it a little more or is it just as hard? How do you compare the two?

Hunter: I think it’s really difficult and it’s really a high. You know, uh, you feel the wind blowing in your hair when you do a series, you know in the best of times. That’s how it feels, like wow we are taking a ride. Um, and other times, it’s just trying to catch up. But, I’ll tell you, you know, this work is really fulfilling. It’s very fulfilling and it’s really kind of, it’s great for me as an actor, you know, as an actress, to get to adapt and be flexible, you know, to be, you’re demanded to be very flexible and very adaptable and to be very much a problem solver on a set like this. And, you know, I kind of used the skills that I’ve developed over these years doing feature films, um, and it just kind of accelerated them, to, to, to make this series. Um, and like I said, you know it’s both exhilarating and somewhat frustrating.

Saving Grace Holly Hunter Promo Shot #9 - PH Jeff Riedel

Hunter: I called Dillon McDermott who’d done The Practice, you know, and I called Dillon because he’s a buddy and because I so respect him, uh, and also because he had done a David E. Kelley series. That’s very particular, because, you know, basically I was asking him something I’d never asked an actor before, which was, how do you memorize all those lines? You know, and suddenly that was a very pertinent question, for the first time in my career. Was, with David E. Kelley the actors never stop talking, I mean, it’s just incredibly sophisticated and fast paced dialogue. And, I just asked him, you know, what gives? How do you do this every week? Because that had never been a concern of mine, um, on a, you know, I’ll memorize the entire script before I start shooting a feature, um, it’s no big deal. Or, or a play. But, you know Dillon just said look, you know, it’s a scary ride when you first get on and you’re going to be able to do it and, you know, your memory is going to become a really well used muscle. Very early on and, you know, it’s not going to fail you the way that you’re afraid of. And, you know, he’s right, he was right. Uh, it is, it’s, it has fear inside it thought all the time. The idea of memorizing a script, you know, for two days, having only two days to memorize it and then just shoot it. It’s a, it’s dicey. That’s the technique I’ve ended up using. I just take two days and memorize half the script one day, half the script the next and then just start shooting.

Question: One of thing I noticed in many of your features is, uh, how much location can almost be a character. Whether it’s Arizona in Raising Arizona or the beach in Piano and how much Oklahoma City is really a part of this show. And what your thoughts are on the importance of a locale to enhance the story?

Hunter: Oh, just a great question. Such a great question, I mean, I just saw, you know, a movie called The Gunfighter the other night with Gregory Peck, um, and you know it was just amazing to see that movie, because the locations are so exotic. I mean, they shot that western in someplace where they normally don’t shoot westerns. Sometimes it looked like they were on the Sahara desert. I’m not sure if they were in the States. They probably were, but I was just reminded how potent location can be and how, you know unfortunately, with television, you know, you’re shooting the vast majority of television in Los Angeles and we are no exception. Um, we try to make LA as, as you know, Oklahoma like as we can, but the fact is that we are in LA. Um, and you know, money is always, money is always tight. It’s a gigantic fantasy of ours to be able to shoot in Oklahoma City. It would change everything. It would change everything. You know, but at the same time, you know the brilliance of Los Angeles is the depth of the talent here. I mean, the talent pool in LA just doesn’t stop, from, you know, set decorators to extras to day players to you know, everyone knows how it goes. The whole city knows. And, this is the privilege of being here, is this is what this town is built around and that’s a pleasure, uh, to be here for that. On the other hand, then you have the look and the feel and the look of the people and the behavior of the people in a completely different part of the country.

Question: I’m a fellow Georgia girl, so I wanted to ask you if you ever get back to Atlanta and if there’s any places you try and stop by when you’re in town?

Hunter: Wow, I mean the Fox Theater and The Pleasant Peasant right next door to the Fox, I always loved to go there. I mean, I try to hook up with a tour of the Fox, uh, not long ago and I’m just dying to do it. I didn’t get to it. I went to the aquarium instead, which was outrageous, just outrageous. Um, and I loved to go to, I loved to go to the Fox, which is just one of the great theaters in the world, I think. And, then go to The Peasant, uh, which is right next-door. And, I love Krispy Kreme doughnuts downtown, because that’s like, I don’t know, but I think it might be the second one in the United States and I just remember going to it as a tiny child. It’s a place that I feel I always have to go back to when I go, when I go home about twice a year.

Question: I was wondering, um, how much of a back story were you given for Grace when the series began and um, how much did you kind of create of her as you were going on?

Hunter: Well, you know the script came to me completely whole, I mean, the “Pilot” came to me fully written, we didn’t change a word of it. Nancy Miller, who is the creator of the show and the executive producer and is you know, the main fuel for the fire, you know, such a gifted writer. She, uh, provided me with a lot of back-story of the Oklahoma City bombing. She was raised in Oklahoma City. Uh, so you know, she is my main source of information and inspiration.

Question: What are some other shows you like to watch when you have downtime to watch TV?

Hunter: The Sopranos, The Shield, Weeds, uh you know, I think Rescue Me has just been kind of an amazing thing and uh, Mad Men. The Wire is kind of incredible. The Wire is amazing.

Saving Grace Season Two Cast Photo - PH Frank Ockenfels

Hunter: Oh my god. Like, well the practical jokes really, really are extensive this year and they’re all on screen. So, I’m not going to bust any of them out. They’re pretty good and extremely elaborate. And, and there’s a lot of them.

Question: Holly, what you’re most looking forward to for this second season, overall on the show or maybe just for Grace?

Hunter: Well, you know it’s always interesting to see where the writers take me and then I just go. But, you know this season the scripts have been, you know, extraordinary, really extraordinary. We’re just getting ready to start shooting our eighth script and it’s wow, what a, what a great thing to have experienced each one of these stories. You know, this is a more complex, uh, ride that Grace takes. It’s a very, very sophisticated show in some ways and I think it kind of found itself over the first season. Because, it’s complex in character and in plot and in you know, how Grace connects with her personal world and how she connects with her professional world. Um, and so, I think we’ve struck that balance right away in this season and last season we found that balance, as the stories went on. So, that’s been really exciting to be part of that, uh, really being able to take the show to another level.

Saving Grace plays tonight on TNT after a new episode of The Closer.

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"I keep hoping people will like abstractions, space to dream, consider things that don't necessarily add up."

"Film can do amazing things with abstraction, but it rarely gets a chance. People are treated like idiots, and people are not idiots. We're hip to the human condition, the human experience, and we love mysteries."

"Creating a place is super important. Like Sunset Boulevard, for instance, which is one of my favorite films. I want to be there in that house. I can drive up Sunset Boulevard even now, and I say, If only I could turn off and go to that house, and I just can´t believe that I can´t do it. That´s why I love looking at that film over and over. I don´t care about the story or even about knowing it - I love to experience that place."

"But what's so fantastic is to get down into areas where things are abstract and where things are felt, or understood in an intuitive way that, you can't, you know, put a microphone to somebody at the theatre and say 'Did you understand that?' but they come out with a strange, fantastic feeling and they can carry that, and it opens some little door or something that's magical and that's the power that film has."

"Personally, I think movies should do something that books or music can´t do by themselves. The story can be about any number of things, but there should be a ringing of truth that´s completely powerful or thrilling. Movies like Sunset Boulevard or Lolita are much bigger than the stories they tell."

"It´s a very dangerous thing, this movie business. Because no one will ever know what film could be when a filmmaker has to talk about it and convince people with words. Maybe somebody´s got them in his mind and can put them on film with the right sounds, but he can´t put them into words, you know, and sell the idea. And so those guys are fresh out of luck. It´s like Bergman in Hollywood - I don´t think it would have happened."

"I want to make movies that you can´t go to in a car or plane or a boat. You´ve got to buy a theater ticket to go into that world, to have that experience. I would like to think you could be taken into a space that is film-space, even if it´s only for a moment within the film and it needs all the rest of the film to make it happen. In this sound-and-picture space, you should know something, or have a feeling that you couldn´t have unless there was cinema. I know there has to be a story. I´m interested in that. But I like the idea that film can be really film as well as do the other things"

"I know that films are going to keep getting better and better. It´s exciting. One image coming up to another image, and then a third image with this sound... It´s a character and a setting. It´s a mood. I just love mood. Underneath the surface of things - somewhere in there, it´s happening. Most films are on the surface. Most films are one-line jokes. When you walk out of the theater, it´s like you´ve been eating cotton candy. I think people really want to be able to make good films, and we´ve got to be able to get the chance."

"They can take you to another place and give you a very powerful experience. And it’s only just started. They could be so powerful, so powerful. But they have to get into this abstract, nonstory, nonlinear thing. Now the payoffs are that Rocky knocks down the Russkie, and people cheer, and it’s powerful — it’s been built to do that and it works. But there’s other things that a film could do. It could open something up inside a person, and you’d say, “I’ve never had this experience.” Maybe it doesn’t make you cry or laugh, but it just thrills you in some way you’ve never been thrilled before. A film could do that."

" I could make my films in 16 mm in my garage, but I love a big screen and good sound, and for that you need money and equipment."

GEORGE LUCAS:

"I'm a visual filmmaker. I do films that are kinetic and I tend to focus on character as it is created through editing and light, not stories. I started out as a harsh critic of story and character.

"I was always coming from pure cinema - I was useing the grammar of film to create content. I think graphically, not linearly."

"I hated scripting writing. I hated stories, and I hated plot, and I wanted to make visual films that had nothing to do with telling a story. I didn't want to know about stories and plot and characters and all that sort of stuff. And that's what I did. My first films were very abstract - tone poems, visual."

I was interested in abstract, purely visual films and cinema-verite documentaries."

"I wanted to make abstract films that are emotional and I still do."

"I don't want to be a businessman. My ambition is to make movies, but all by myself, to shoot them, cut them, make stuff I want to, just for my own exploration, to see if I can combine images in a certain way."

"My only interest in life is to make films, explore films and grow as a person."

"Making a movie is very difficult and painful, and if someone comes along after you've done all this work and says you're a fool and an idiot, it's very hard to pick it up and do it again."

"I could do "Koyaanisqatsi" but not "Taxi Driver". I've been trying to rethink the art of movies - it's not a play, not a book, not music or dance. People were aware of that in the silent era. But when the talkies started they lost track of it. Film basically became a recording medium."

"I come out of a nonstory, noncharacter type of pure cinema. For me, the idea of heavily plotted or heavily character driven drama is not where I started."

On the sixties experimental film scene and Canyon Cinema (http://www.canyoncinema.com) :  "I came from a very avant garde documentary kind of film making world. I like cinema verité, documentaries. I liked nonstory, noncharacter tone poems that were being done in San Francisco at that time."

On THX 1138:  "I wanted it to look like a very slick, studied documentary in terms of technique. I come from a background of graphics, photography, art and painting-and I'm very graphics-conscious."

Peter Greenaway:

"I don't think we've seen any cinema yet. I think we've seen 100 years of illustrated text."

"If you want to tell stories, be a writer, not a filmmaker."

"I still would like you to feel the enthusiasm that all those people felt in the twenties and thirties, that indeed we had discovered, with cinema, the great 20th-century, all-embracing medium. There were extraordinary apologists for what it could become, but I feel it hasn't become that. Cinema has been dragged down by mimetic association with all the other art forms, predominantly with the 19th century novel, and because of its distribution situation and its apparent desire to appeal to the lowest common denominator, it has gone in directions which have not fulfilled those extraordinary promises, in general terms. But I still have this sneaking, hopeful suspicion that we can return to those optimistic, ambitious days and make something of what could be a most extraordinary medium."

"My favourite film-maker west of the English Channel is not English - but to me doesn't seem American either - David Lynch - a curious American-European film-maker. He has - against odds - achieved what we want to achieve here. He takes great risks with a strong personal voice and adequate funds and space to exercise it. I thought Blue Velvet and Eraserhead were masterpieces."

"I am looking for cinema that is non-narrative."

SLAVKO VORKAPICH:

"two conditions must exist to transform a film into a form of art: there must be a kinaesthetic organisation of movement and, at the same time, the literal meaning of the shots must be transcended; the shots must become images."

"My principle interest is whether film can become an autonomous form of art."

"A photograph of a work of art is not a work of art. Simply recording a scene which depends on photography of acting alone will simply make a photo-chemical recording of something....A true work of art lives right here. It has the quality of presence; It's a living creature."

"Please forget the story or the dramatic values as you watch these films. Simply let your eye be your guide. If you can, try to achieve an innocence of the eye by wiping away all past knowledge."

"By seeing, I mean let your perception be your complete guide, without reading them. Almost any mistake can be accepted if you 'read' the story."

"to me, film by the virtue of movement is directly sensory the way music is directly sensory....Literature, you must read and then interpret....That's where [film's] possibilities lie of being an independent form of art." (Kevles, p43)

"...two conditions must exist to transform a film into a form of art: there must be a kinesthetic organisation of movement and, at the same time, the literal meaning of the shots must be transcended..."

Francis Coppola:

It combines so many other art forms, as do theater and opera, but the essence of cinema is editing. It's the combination of what can be extraordinary images, images of people during emotional moments, or just images in a general sense, but put together in a kind of alchemy. A number of images put together a certain way become something quite above and beyond what any of them are individually.

“This, of course, was one of the elements of the Eisenstein film that was so exciting. How the editing was able to take -- that's always fascinating -- take this, and this, and put it together, and have something come out that was neither of those two things. Of course, the sense of rhythm that editing can do! I was struck, I remember, on Ten Days That Shook The World, how although it was a silent film, there were sequences where you actually almost could hear the machine guns firing, because of the way it was edited. So it's a form of alchemy, of magic, that is very appealing. I think cinema, movies, and magic have always been closely associated. Because the very earliest people who made film were magicians. One of the aspects of it was the idea of an illusion, a magical illusion, in the early days of movies.

A lot of early magicians began experimenting, using basically what is cinema to do their illusions. And of course we know that some of the early pioneers, like Meliès and what have you, were magicians who used cinema to create illusions. So I think cinema always had -- as did theater for me -- this ability to create some kind of magic, either through lighting -- but to use technology to create magic is what appealed to me, I think.”

ALFRED HITCHCOCK:

On Vertigo: "The story was of less importance to me than the over-all visual impact, once the picture was completed."

On Psycho: "I don't care about the subject matter, I don't care about the acting, but I do care about the pieces of film, the photography, the sound-track, and the other technical ingredients that made the audience scream. I feel it is tremendously satisfying for us to use the cinematic art to achieve a mass emotion."

.... "It wasn't the audiences' enjoyment of the book, or the performance, that caused them to scream. They were aroused by pure film".

...."It's the kind of film where the technique is more important than the content."

"Walt Disney has the best casting system. If he don't like an actor, he just tears him up.”

Quick Synopsis: No one believes she was taken.

Long Synopsis: A young working class family is told that their baby died in the fire. The mother doesn’t believe that is what happened. She thinks her daughter was taken and the fire was started to cover it up. No one else believes her. Her faith that her daughter is still out there leads to the breakup of her marriage. She never gives up hope and one day runs into a woman that was at the party that has a six year old daughter. She thinks that it might be her daughter and sets out to prove it. With the help of a State Representative that gets the police involved, the find that she may have been right all along.

Review: Little Girl Lost: The Delimar Vera Story is based on a true story. It stars Judy Reyes (Scrubs), Ana Ortiz (Ugly Betty) and A. Martinez (L.A. Law).

The movie is straight forward, but is put together very well. It takes you from the birth of baby Delimar to her disappearance to her being found. It is a very sad story with a very happy ending. Reyes, as the mother who never gives up, is especially good in this highly dramatic role.

Overall, Little Girl Lost: The Delimar Vera Story is worth checking out, but it is crowded tonight on TV. It premieres tonight on Lifetime Movie Network. It plays twice tonight and another five times over the next 10 days, so you have plenty of chances to catch it.

Photo CR: Lifetime Movie Network

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