Karen Allen - Memories From The Set
July 1, 2021 // By Dr. Joshua Sherman
Sometimes when one door shuts, another window of opportunity opens. For Berkshire-based actress Karen Allen, that timeless proverb manifested itself in a literal sense long before she starred in blockbuster films such as Animal House and Raiders of the Lost Ark. When Karen opened her window on a fateful spring day in the Dupont Circle neighborhood of Washington, D.C., in the early 1970s, it started a chain of serendipitous events that would eventually lead her to the pinnacle of Hollywood superstardom. We at Berkshire Magazine had the immense privilege of speaking with Karen about her early years as an actress, the defining experiences that helped to shape her career, the reasons why she loves living in the Berkshires, and her enthusiasm for the upcoming fifth film in the Indiana Jones series.
PHOTO, PETER BAIAMONTE; ALL OTHERS PHOTOS COURTESY OF KAREN ALLEN AND PARAMOUNT PICTURES
Early Opportunities
After graduating from high school in College Park, Maryland, in the late 1960s, Karen enrolled at the Fashion Institute of Technology (F.I.T.) in New York City. Throughout the course of her childhood, Karen had dedicated a significant portion of her time to pursuing her passion for fabrics and textiles. “New York City in 1969 was ablaze with creativity,” Karen recalls. “I met a lot of interesting people there. Still, by the end of the first year, I was starting to have doubts that a career as a fashion designer was the right path for me.” As Karen watched her more ambitious friends from F.I.T. begin to work in low-level positions carrying coffee for a small cadre of elite and well-known New York City designers, she decided to return home and re-evaluate her options.
Karen worked for a small boutique in College Park for a year, before embarking on a year-long journey abroad. She spent the first six months of the year by herself in Jamaica and then left for Mexico with several of her friends. They then spent the next several months driving through Mexico, all the way down to Peru together. As Karen took in the breathtaking sights of South American and Mesoamerican coastlines, she found herself drifting back towards one of her other creative passions. “The one thing I felt that I truly excelled in at school was writing,” says Karen. “I loved to write poems and short stories. While I was traveling through South America, I read the works of a lot of South American writers, such as Pablo Neruda, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Jorge Amado. It turned me on to a whole different approach to writing.”
Upon returning to the United States, Karen channeled her newfound literary inspiration into her own creative writing when she moved to Washington, D.C., and joined a writers group. She then bought a typewriter and put it on a little desk by her apartment window. On a cold November night, she began to notice another person in the building opposite her—also with a typewriter similarly placed next to their window. “The whole winter, I watched someone else’s hands on that typewriter while I sat typing at mine. I couldn’t make out whether it was a man or a woman, but I would always try to imagine what they were writing.” As the seasons turned warmer, Karen flung her window open to get a breath of fresh spring air. She then noticed that the stranger with the typewriter in the adjacent building had opened their window as well. A youthful-looking man poked his head out of the window, and the two started an engaging conversation.
As they chatted, the young man revealed that he was a theater director from New York who had just returned from Poland after a six-year stint working there. He also said that he ran a theater company in Washington, DC. Several days later, he and Karen began talking again. During the course of their second conversation, he told her that the teacher that he had been working with in Poland was coming to the United States to perform in Philadelphia. He invited Karen to watch the performance with him.
Karen recalls: “I got in a car about a week later and drove to Philadelphia with a bunch of strangers. Once we got there, we went to a church and sat down on the floor together. Into the church came the Polish Laboratory Theatre, which at the time, unbeknownst to me, was the most famous theater company in the world, run by Jerzy Grotowski. They came onto the stage and did a two-hour play, speaking Polish the whole time. The play was called Apocalypsis Cum Figuris. At the end of it, I was a different person than the person who had walked into that theater.”
OFF CAMERA Karen Allen, George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, and Harrison Ford on the set of Raiders of the Lost Ark, which was released 40 years ago this summer.
As Karen walked up to Grotowski and shook his hand after the play finished, tears welled in her eyes as she stood there in astonishment. On the car ride back to D.C., she asked her newfound theater director friend who had brought her to the play if he trained actors. He then offered her the opportunity to audition for an actors training program. After auditioning for the program, Karen was accepted and spent the next several years honing her acting skills while working with his small and experimental theater company. After the company’s grant money started to dwindle, Karen relocated to New York City, where she signed up for classes at the Lee Strasberg Theatre & Film Institute and the Stella Adler Studio of Acting. “I really learned to study a play, and understand its history and significance while I was there,” says Karen. “It was all fascinating work that I hadn’t really done before.”
One day when she was walking out of the lobby of the Lee Strasberg Theatre & Film Institute, Karen saw a small card posted on a bulletin board. It was a casting call for a film. Although she was more interested in pursuing a career in theater than a career in film at the time, Karen nonetheless felt compelled to send in her picture and resumé and try her luck. “I had no film credits at all at the time. I only had experimental theater credits on my resumé, and I had a very unprofessional group of photographs. Still, for some reason, the casting director for Universal pictures saw something in me through those pictures. She thought that I matched her idea of what Katy in Animal House was.”
Karen then showed up at Universal Studios on Park Avenue for the audition. Once there, she met Chris Miller, John Landis, and Harold Ramis, the director and writers for Animal House. After Karen auditioned for the role, she was invited back for several readings and was then offered the opportunity to fly out to Los Angeles to read the part for the executives of Universal Studios.
Karen recalls that when she went out to the Los Angeles audition, a humorous wardrobe malfunction hampered her performance. “I had one good pair of pants to my name, and I had one good pair of shoes. They were stacked heels that were very awkward to walk in. I showed up to the audition, and Peter Riegert (who ended up playing “Boone” in Animal House) was about four inches shorter than I was in the heels. I was running through my lines with Peter, and I thought, ‘This is a disaster.’ I ended up taking off my shoes, but the audition still didn’t go very well. I was surprised when they called me back and told me that they wanted me to be in Animal House, but I was still incredibly excited. That was the beginning of my career in film.”
Hollywood Memories
Several years after Karen made her cinematic debut as Katy in Animal House, she was offered the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to star as Marion in Raiders of the Lost Ark. Karen says that although the studio originally wanted Tom Selleck to star in the role, his television contract for Magnum, P.I. prevented him from starring in the film. Karen was cast in the role of Marion before they had the chance to find another actor to star as Indiana Jones, and subsequently did readings with actors such as Tim Matheson and John Shea. Karen believes that George Lucas and Steven Spielberg initially held off on auditioning Harrison Ford for the role of Indiana Jones due to the fact that the second film in the Star Wars franchise was about to be released. “They knew that they wanted Indiana Jones to have multiple films,” notes Karen. “They probably thought that it didn’t make sense for him to play both Indiana and Han Solo. However, they decided that it was going to be Harrison. He ended up being a great fit for the role.”
Although Karen first met Harrison in Spielberg’s office across the street from Universal Studios in Los Angeles, she really got to know him better when he invited her for dinner. Not long after that, Harrison flew off to Hawaii to shoot the beginning of the film. After spending several weeks there, he then met Karen and the rest of the cast in London to shoot a large number of the scenes together.
“Harrison and I came from two different directions as actors,” says Karen. “Coming from a theatrical background, I was used to spending eight hours a day, five or six days a week working with other actors and a director. I was also accustomed to talking about roles and dissecting them and constantly rehearsing them. That wasn’t Harrison’s approach at all. He didn’t want to talk about the scenes. He just wanted to shoot them. That was something I wasn’t used to.”
Karen says that over time, she came to understand Harrison’s method of acting more clearly as she began to grasp the cinematic vision that Spielberg and Lucas had for the film. “I learned a lot from Harrison. He has a really great technique of knowing how to just do purely physical acting in front of a camera. Most of the films I had done in the past were the kind of relationist films where you forget the camera and just act with the other actor. With films like Raiders or Star Wars, you have to be aware of where the camera is all of the time. I had none of those skills when I started working on Raiders, but by watching Harrison, I learned to appreciate that type of acting and understand its value. It’s an incredibly good skill to acquire as an actor.”
WRITERS’ BLOCK Karen Allen, Steven Spielberg, Harrison Ford, and John Rhys-Davies on the set of Raiders. In the works now is Indiana Jones’s fifth installment, to be released July 28, 2022.
Karen says that she also learned a lot through working with Spielberg. “He does a vast amount of preparation,” notes Karen. “He thinks everything through. He likes to work with storyboards and likes to have a truly developed sense of what every film he works on is going to look like.” Karen adds that although Spielberg puts a vast amount of effort and thought into his preparation, his hard work gives him the freedom to experiment and improvise with his directorial decisions on the set. “He’s both clear in his vision—and totally open to positive changes at the same time,” says Karen. “If someone brings him an idea, he will listen to it. If he likes it, he’ll act on it.”
Karen believes that Spielberg’s openness, versatility, and adaptability plays a key role in the success of his films. “The thing about film that makes it so challenging is that if a scene is set outside—or in a room with windows—the weather can change everything. If it rains, a scene might have to be shot in a different place. If you get upset about changes, it does you no favors at all. Being able to make split second decisions and be ready for changes, while still being aware of everything that needs to happen in order for a scene to be successful is a beautiful quality. Anybody who can work with that kind of fluidity is wonderful to work with.”
One of Karen’s most vivid memories from the set of Raiders of the Lost Ark involves the pivotal “Well of Souls” scene. She explained that there were six thousands snakes in the pit, but when the film lights were turned on, the snakes scattered to the dark cool areas (to avoid the heat of the lamps). So, instead, from above, the crew poured buckets of snakes (200 at a time) at her and Harrison’s feet to capture the shot. “We did two weeks of shooting for that sequence,” says Karen. “By the end of the two weeks, you had to get used to them. It was almost a normal occurrence. It was like ‘Here come the snakes,’ right on cue.”
Karen says that although the character of Indiana Jones is famous for his hatred of snakes, Harrison was not particularly bothered by them. “He had pants and boots on. I was barefoot in a flimsy dress!” She adds that although the cobras were “milked” for their venom by trained professionals, the most dangerous aspect of the scene for her wasn’t the snakes—it was the fire. “The worst crisis for me in that scene was the fire torches, because the white dress that I had on in the scene was made out of highly flammable material. They couldn’t treat it with anti-flammable chemicals, because it would ruin the fabric. I had to watch the fire out of one corner of my eye, while watching out for the snakes that were all over the place. I thought the worst was over when the snake scenes were done, but then we went right to the catacomb scenes, in which they dropped potters’ dirt into my mouth and nostrils from above. And the snakes were still coming out of the walls! Between those two scenes, it was a total of four weeks of snakes. There was never a dull moment during those scenes.”
Coming to the Berkshires
After Karen finished shooting Raiders of the Lost Ark, she took a year and a half off from film acting to go back to her roots and return to the theater. It was then that she came to the Berkshires for the first time. “I was feeling a little bit deprived of the experience of working in theater,” says Karen. “I was offered all kinds of television and film roles, but I knew that I needed to do some theater acting to re-ground myself and find my creative center.” Karen says that she came to the Berkshires for the first time in 1981 to do a play at the Berkshire Theatre Festival. Karen stayed at the Red Lion Inn for six weeks while they rehearsed, and immediately found that she enjoyed the Berkshires region. “I thought, ‘This is a pretty great area.’ I had a great time wandering around and driving through the scenery.”
She later experienced a crucial healing moment in the Berkshires after finishing a demanding theatrical run that changed her life.
While performing on Broadway in Monday After the Miracle, a play about the adult Helen Keller, Karen ruptured one of her vocal cords. When the play closed, Karen sought the help of Kristin Linklater, a legendary vocal coach who was living up in West Stockbridge. “We worked together doing humming exercises and other types of vocal exercises. I spent the rest of the time bicycling all over the place. That’s when I really fell in love with the Berkshires. I started imagining myself in the little farmhouses that I would ride by.”
While Karen was still working with Linklater, she went to a local Berkshires realtor who showed her over a dozen houses. After looking for five years, Karen and her husband-to-be Kale Browne found a house in Monterey where they settled together. After they amicably split years later, Karen remained in the house that they bought. “I have a little love affair with this place,” says Karen. “There are lots of obvious reasons to love living here, but there’s just a certain feeling I have about the Berkshires that’s hard to put into words.”
Karen says that one of her theatrical engagements in the Berkshires also led to a collaborative project with Hollywood icon Paul Newman, who directed the stellar 1987 film The Glass Menagerie. “I did the play version of The Glass Menagerie at Williamstown Theatre Festival for the first time in 1985 with Joanne Woodward. On our second or third day of rehearsal with Joanne and the director Nikos Psacharopoulos, I could feel that someone had come into the rehearsal room. I remember turning around and seeing Paul Newman on the steps and feeling myself swoon internally.” While Karen and Joanne were performing the play at Williamstown, they were offered the opportunity to take the play to London. “They wanted us to commit to six months on the West End of London, but Joanne didn’t want to go,” says Karen. “It was at that point that Paul Newman stepped in and said, ‘Let me direct a film version of this.’ It was an incredible experience. We filmed it like a play with all of the scenes filmed in order. Paul really wanted to open it up in a way where it didn’t feel like you were watching a filmed play. I really enjoyed working with him, Joanne, and John Malkovich. It was a very small group working on that film, but there wasn’t a soul on the set that I didn’t greatly admire.”
The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and Beyond
After The Glass Menagerie, Karen starred in a number of high-profile Hollywood films over the next several decades, including Scrooged, Malcolm X, and The Perfect Storm. In 2008, Karen got the chance to reprise her role as Marion Ravenwood in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Karen describes her experience on the set of Crystal Skull as “pure fun,” and adds that the cultural aesthetic of the 1950s had a very heavy influence on the vision for the film. “I think George Lucas and Steven Spielberg wanted to make it an homage to the ’50s,” notes Karen. “They were using a lot of ’50s imagery. Throughout the film, there were a lot of 1950s science fiction tropes. There were also many fun shots, such as the one with Shia LaBeouf pulling up on the motorcycle, looking like Marlon Brando.” Karen adds that the film served as a reunion of sorts for the former cast members and that everyone was happy to be back together. “Steven, Harrison and I were all at very different points in our lives than when we filmed Raiders, but it was great to be able to reconnect. There was a different vibration around the whole project.”
As the Hollywood community gears up for the production and release of the fifth film in the storied Indiana Jones series, Karen is excited for what lies ahead. “I’m very happy that there’s going to be a fifth Indiana Jones movie. There were only supposed to be three films. I never anticipated they would make a fourth, but when they did a fourth movie and decided to include me, I was thrilled. I think there was a real setup at the end of the fourth film that made the audience believe that there would be a fifth. Steven Spielberg said that he had such a good time making the fourth that he wanted to follow it up. There’s a lot of pressure to do the series justice and honor the legacy, but I know that Steven, Harrison and everyone else involved are going to put in a lot of work to make another wonderful film.”