Thirty-five years ago, Karen Allen fell in love with the Berkshires. Today, it’s her creative haven.

She had injured a vocal cord during a run of a Broadway-bound play, and sought the help of voice coach Kristin Linklater, who lived in West Stockbridge. Allen stayed in the Berkshires for six weeks during a New England spring, working with Linklater to heal, and using her days off to ride around the area on a bicycle, absorbing the scenery.

“She had me humming; humming is a way you can restore a cord,” Allen said. “So I would bike and hum.”

It was during these peaceful rides that Allen decided to call a realtor. She found a place she loved. “A beautiful little house on Lake Garfield,” she remembered. “I made an offer on it, and the people suddenly decided they didn’t want to sell — and my heart was broken! But I never stopped thinking ... I wanted to have a house here. And in 1988, I found the house I’m in now.”

Thirty-five years later, Allen said she’s been able to create not just a good career, but a good life here, doing all the things she likes. She acts, directs, teaches, knits, runs a store (Karen Allen Fiber Arts in Great Barrington), and has tackled a long list of home improvement projects that makes her life beautiful.

At present, Allen, who turned 72 this week, is also starring in the world premiere of “Lunar Eclipse” by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Donald Margulies. The production at Shakespeare & Company in Lenox runs through Oct. 22.

“I couldn’t say no,” she said, of the play, which features a married couple discussing their relationship over the course of the night, as they sit outdoors watching a lunar eclipse.

Allen talked to the Globe in a space she designed above her store, on what would have been a Monday off. Instead, she did the interview as she helped the retail staff change over inventory for fall. “Work is one of those weird words, you know? I love the work I do. There’s a part of me that would like to have no demands of me. Then somebody offers you something wonderful and you’re like, how do I say no to this?”

Allen, who is from the Midwest but spent childhood moving around the country, started her acting career at the experimental Washington Theatre Laboratory in Washington, D.C. She moved to New York, performed at the Williamstown Theatre Festival, and studied at the Lee Strasberg Theatre & Film Institute. That’s where she happened to see a posting about an audition for a feature film.

The movie turned out to be “Animal House,” directed by John Landis. She landed the role of Katy.

“I didn’t know how to read a film script. I can’t really say I understood what the film was. I did [understand] Katy — this plucky college student whose boyfriend was hanging with this group of guys, and she was having none of his shenanigans. I thought, OK, I think I’ve had that kind of experience before,” she said. “There were a lot of the actors in that film who had never done a film before, and I have to hand that to John Landis, because he wanted the right people for the right roles. He liked the idea, I think, that most of those actors were theater actors.”

Allen moved on to projects such as the miniseries “East of Eden,” William Friedkin’s “Cruising” with Al Pacino, and the Harvard-set film “A Small Circle of Friends.”

“Then I did ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark,’ and that launched me into this other place because it was so successful,” she said. “And at that point, against the flow of whatever anybody else thought I should do, I thought, ‘I want to go back and work in the theater.’”

Not everyone understood, but her agent at the time, Joan Hyler, who had also become a friend, did.

“People were like, ‘What’s wrong with her?’ They thought I should be on this trajectory. ... [Hyler] was like, ‘If this is what you want to do, this is your life.’”

Allen joined three plays after “Raiders,” including the Broadway-bound production “Monday After the Miracle,” a sequel to “The Miracle Worker.” It was during a run of the show at the Kennedy Center that Allen, who played Helen Keller, injured her vocal cord and headed to the Berkshires.

It wasn’t until years later — after starring in more projects and having her son, Nicholas, with her now ex-husband, Kale Browne — that Allen realized her part-time home in the Berkshires could be the right place to spend more time.

“I started to develop this feeling of New York City for a child was a world of no. They start to lurch into the street – no. No, no, no. Then we come to the country, and it’s just a world of yes. Anything he wanted to do is sort of like ‘yes, yes.’ I thought, ‘Do I want him to grow up in a world of no, or do I want him to grow up in a world of yes?’ ... I said, I’m gonna try the yes.”

She returned to New York while Nicholas was in fourth grade, but by then the opportunities for her acting career had changed.

“I was headed toward 50. For women, you go through periods where suddenly they don’t know what to do with you,” Allen said, adding that life in the city was becoming difficult to manage. “Particularly as a single mom, and I couldn’t figure out a way to hold on to my place up here, have an apartment in New York, have him in school. ... After 9/11, a lot of work in New York just went away. It was tough on the theaters. People didn’t want to travel. They didn’t want to come into New York City.”

All of this fueled her decision to return to the Berkshires, a place where she would hear “yes” more often herself and could focus on other creative pursuits — like fashion.

Allen had grown up knitting and had studied at the Fashion Institute of Technology for three semesters from 1969 to 1971. In 2003, she returned to FIT to study Japanese knitting machines and brought those skills back to the Berkshires, starting her own knitwear line. That led to opening her store in 2005, in a tiny space on Railroad Avenue. Now, it’s in a prime spot on the other side of the street.

“I think, in order to survive as an actor, you have to have something else you love to do. Because otherwise you do a job, you do a play, and you’re so consumed, and then it’s over and you go into this little period of mourning. ... If you’re too anxious about getting employed, again, you can tend to do things that are kind of stupid — you know, plays that you don’t really like or films that you think are not good.”

Allen said she knew this early — that there had to be more than acting. “I love this profession so much and I respect it so much. I want to wait for that thing that I can’t say no to. And in between, let me figure out something else to do that I enjoy doing so much that the time goes by beautifully. I didn’t want to be that pining actor. And I knew way too many of them.”

A full-time home in the Berkshires has also made it possible for Allen to do more theater.

She’s taught and directed plays at the Simon’s Rock campus of Bard College in Great Barrington, all while continuing her film career; her features have included “The Perfect Storm” and “Colewell,” a 2019 indie drama in which she stars as a woman who runs a post office being absorbed by another ZIP code.

She’s also on the board of the Berkshire International Film Festival, skis at Butternut Basin (Ski Butternut), and has raised money for the community purchase of Great Barrington’s downtown movie theatre, the Triplex.

But she said one of her favorite spots is still her own shop, where, in a studio space above the store made colorful by shelves of bright cashmere, she uses the knitting machines to create scarves, sweaters, and gloves.

Brian Long, a producer who’s worked with Allen on theater and film projects — including a short film she directed, “A Tree, A Rock, A Cloud” — said that in the Berkshires, Allen has created a “base for happiness.”

“It’s one thing to know what makes you happy,” he said. “It’s another thing to figure out how to do that, especially in the world of arts.”

After working as a chef on Martha’s Vineyard and in Denmark, Allen’s son also now lives in the Berkshires and works as head cultivator at a cannabis farm.

Kristi Zea, Allen’s friend who’s done production design on films such as “Goodfellas,” “Silence of the Lambs,” and “The Departed,” is buying property in Great Barrington. She said Allen makes the Berkshires look like an ideal place to pursue creative projects around beauty.

“Her energies can be so completely satisfied there,” Zea said. “This play is a case in point. She just plunged in.”

Allen said the production “Lunar Eclipse,” which opened Sept. 15, has been a whirlwind, even for someone who’s used to doing a lot at once. She was told of the opportunity before the summer release of the latest “Raiders” sequel, “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny,” in which she reprised her role as Marion Ravenwood opposite Harrison Ford.

Long a fan of Margulies, Allen had met Birney, who was already set to star. She loved the journey the characters take during the play, that over the course of a night — and an eclipse — a couple finds a way to communicate.

“You feel like these people ... are ... changed at the end of the play, that something in their relationship has shifted a little, they have opened up their hearts to each other in a way that they normally avoid doing,” she said.

Birney said Allen might be best known for huge movie hits, but she is a theater actor first, and it shows.

“I think a lot of movie stars want to do theater to get some legitimacy. I don’t think Karen thought or thinks in those terms. She started out in the theater. Clearly that was an early love, and she’s lived her whole life that way,” Birney said, referencing Allen’s ability to pursue projects that feel just right in all parts of her life.

“I’m just filled with admiration for her and yet she’s incredibly accessible and easy and fun to be with.”

Allen said, as usual, her plate will still be full after “Lunar Eclipse.” She hopes to helm a film adaptation of Joan Ackermann’s play “The Batting Cage,” which Allen has directed for the stage at Simon’s Rock. Also, her store is running low on her gloves. She wants to make more when she can.

“I think if you choose things that have real meaning to you, it’s not that important whether it’s a big hit,” Allen said. “You can choose a film that you think is going to be incredibly successful, and it can just bomb for some reason; it’s the wrong story at the wrong time. You can do something where you’re sort of like, ‘this maybe is going to work’ — and suddenly it’s breaking box office records. It’s not really in your control. The only thing you can really do — ultimately — is do things you care about.”

“Lunar Eclipse” runs through Oct. 22 at Shakespeare & Company. Karen Allen Fiber Arts is open Monday to Saturday 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. and on Sunday from noon to 5 p.m.

Meredith Goldstein can be reached at Meredith.Goldstein@Globe.com.