Why Joan Allen is frying high
If acting doesn't work out for Joan Allen, she has a fallback plan: she'll spend her days cooking.
The lithe, blonde actress - known for playing intelligent, morally centred women - has discovered a new love of late. Several months ago, she says, she stumbled into her kitchen, and has found it hard to leave. 'I've never been much of a cook,' she says. 'But in the past eight months I started looking through cookbooks and really enjoying being in the kitchen. I find it very creative.'
Her two favourite dishes are saganaki, a Greek dish of fried cheese that she and her daughter, Sadie, recently discovered while holidaying there; and braised roasts, which she cooks with red wine and caramelised onions. 'I'm also reaching that point in my life where the hunger to work has given way to the realisation that there are so many other great things to do,' Allen says.
Not that there's much chance of her becoming an out-of-work actress any time soon. Her latest role is in The Bourne Ultimatum, reprising her part from the second film - Pamela Landy, a CIA operative who's trying to do the right thing. Although it's a big-budget action film, and Allen is more accustomed to smaller and more character-driven plots, she brought her usual intensity and straightforwardness to it.
'It was fun and a reunion of sorts,' she says. 'A lot of the crew were the same and it was a happy set. I was happy to be back.'
Today, Allen, 49, is dressed in a black smocked top and skinny black pants, an ensemble that showcases her lean, almost angular frame. Her hair and make-up is fuss-free and the only touch of bling is a diamond-studded necklace that spells 'blessed'.
'I really do feel blessed,' she says, lightly fingering the jewellery. A friend gave it to her knowing it would resonate. 'I look at my life and what I get to do, where I get to go. I'm a girl from a cornfield in the middle of nowhere. My dad owned a gas station. I've worked hard, yes, but I've had good fortune and luck and been in the right place at the right time.'
Allen, who now lives in New York, was born in Rochelle, Illinois. In high school, she was voted most likely to succeed. She began working in theatre when she was 20, and came to the notice of the industry when she won a Tony Award in 1988 for a play called Burn This. She did some TV, before perfectly capturing the brittleness of Pat Nixon in the 1995 bio-pic Nixon.
After that there were notable turns in The Ice Storm, Face/Off and Pleasantville. She's been an Oscar nominee three times, the most recent for her part as a beleaguered vice-presidential candidate in The Contender. Critics raved about her performance in Mike Binder's 2005 drama The Upside of Anger as a wronged suburban housewife who discovers some shattering truths. The film did reasonably well at the box office, but has had a more successful DVD life. Allen says Binder wrote the script with her in mind.
'I'm so grateful to him,' she says. 'When he was trying to finance it and going to people for money, some financiers said they wanted him to cast so-and-so, and he said, 'It's Joan Allen'.' But as she has discovered, critical reviews don't necessarily mean that a pile of great scripts will arrive on your doorstep the next day.
'It doesn't necessarily lead to another film,' Allen says. 'All that I have is the experience of making it. If nobody else sees it, I want to make sure that the promise of making it has been fulfilled, and that I've learned something.'
Not surprisingly, she brings a keen intelligence to her role as Landy in the most recent Bourne movie, which was well received in the US when it opened last weekend, displacing The Simpsons Movie from the top of the box-office charts by taking in US$70.2 million.
To prepare for her role, Allen spent time with two women affiliated with the CIA: one who keeps dropping in and out of the field because she's so conflicted about the role; and one who's a 30-year veteran and is deeply loyal to the organisation.
Which of the two did she most closely identify with? 'I think I was more like the career veteran. My sense of her was that a lot of information is classified, there were questions she couldn't ask, and she knew that she was in this world that's somewhat grey.'
The Bourne franchise is great visibility for Allen, who says 'it's nice financially, and is good for my daughter's college fund'. (Her daughter, Sadie, is 13.) 'And it's fun to be part of a completely different genre. It's nice to be seen in different ways because it's so easy to be stere-otyped. And this is a hip, cool and intelligent film.'
When not acting, cooking, or spending time with Sadie, Allen has another love: tending her New York roof garden. 'It's a little more than saying to the gardener, 'Here, go choose something'. I'm a neat freak, and there's something very satisfying about going out on a deck with flowers and plants and cutting them back. I get a lot of gratification from that.'
