FINDING HER INDY-PENDENCE
Actress Karen Allen on clashing with Spielberg, playing strong women and fixing Hollywood
ON-SCREEN and off, Karen Allen has always been an independent woman. It’s what made her so indelible as Marion Ravenwood, heroine of “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” the brassy dame who punched Indiana Jones in the jaw, outdrank an enormous Nepalese barfly and pulled a steak knife on a Nazi-friendly mercenary.
“Before that film, in my early 20s, I had been traveling in Central and South America,” Allen tells The Post. “I was a very independent spirit. I wasn’t playing somebody’s idea of the tough woman who can take care of herself — I really felt that way in the world. I could easily have been living in a bar in Nepal.”
But, she says, her idea of the character clashed with that of director Steven Spielberg: “I was just enough younger [than Spielberg] that I didn’t remember ever watching those Saturday afternoon movie serials that they were basing ‘Raiders’ on. When I would go to the movies, I was watching things like ‘Casablanca,’ and I had a different picture in my head of [my] character . . . I didn’t want her to be a clichéd damsel in distress where the man comes to save her. I didn’t believe anybody was coming to save me!”
The idea of rescuing oneself has been a through-line for Allen, carrying into her newest film role: At 65, she’s the lead in “Year by the Sea,” out Friday. It’s an adaptation of the best-selling memoir by Joan Anderson, in which the author leaves her husband and her settled domestic life to spend a year in a rustic cabin on Cape Cod. In a different way, it’s as trailblazing a film as the one that launched her into stardom years ago.
“Four out of five [of the] main characters are women over 60,” Allen says. In movies today, women are lucky to have one-third as many lines as their male counterparts. One of her co-stars happens to be British actress Celia Imrie, known for the “Bridget Jones” movies and “The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel.” Still, an older-woman-centric film took years to get made, says Allen, mirroring the story of the book behind it.
“Joan tells the story of how her book got rejected, I think, 37 times. There was this line of ‘No one’s really interested in hearing about a woman going through this kind of transition.’ Then she found the right publisher, and it became a best-selling book. Now she’s become a guru of sorts who teaches workshops for women; they come from all over the world to explore the obstacles that are keeping them from taking back their lives.”
For Allen, the theme of taking back your life is a resonant one. Although she went on to other memorable film roles —“Starman,” “Scrooged” — she also started performing in theater. She found, as she got older, that roles in both arenas became fewer and further between — and less interesting.
“There was nothing to be gained from getting into that level of frustration without doing something about it,” she says, “so I moved into directing.” She also moved out of the city to western Massachusetts, where she taught yoga while raising her son, Nicholas, from a 10-year marriage to soap star Kale Browne. She opened a textile shop, Karen Allen Fiber Arts, in Great Barrington, sourcing gorgeous fabrics from around the world.
“It kind of limps along,” she says cheerfully, “but it gives me a lot of pleasure to do it. And the people who have gotten to know it, they love the store.”
Life’s been busy: Last year, her son won the Food Network competition show “Chopped.” And she’s just directed a short film, “A Tree. A Rock. A Cloud.,” based on a Carson McCullers short story, which she’s currently taking on the film-festival circuit.
She may be working on the indie side now, but Allen has some words of advice for mainstream film execs who long for a movie industry as robust as it was when Allen’s face was all over the marquees.
“What’s amazed me is how people who are behind the machinery of getting a film into the world don’t really understand that the baby boomers are their best audience,” she says. “The under-20s are all staring at little boxes in their hands. If we want to keep the film business alive, we need to focus on people in their 50s, 60s, 70s, who grew up going to the movies.
“I love going to the movies — with my girlfriends [and] by myself. But [Hollywood] is giving me comic-book heroes, and that’s just not what interests me.”