Allen was raised in Rochelle, Illinois, which had a population of 8,000. A shy, frightened teenager, whose kneecaps used to shake “up and down” when she spoke in public, she took comfort in Long Day’s Journey into Night’s tacit assertion that life is a struggle. Allen had just started appearing onstage when she saw the film. Hepburn’s performance, she says, was a revelation.
“She talks over the maid sometimes, and she’s sloppy and she falls out of the chair. It is not a neat, tidy sort of scene — there is something very messy about it. It’s a sensual performance, too, as she drifts in and out. And I admired the fluidity with which she went back and forth from pain to laughter to fuzziness to trying to find herself again. It’s a very split character. She’s so tied in to her husband that she can’t extricate herself. But at the same time there’s all this resentment and anger about the past. I guess,” Allen says, laughing softly, “that’s very lifelike to me. We all have these dualities that we swing back and forth between.”
ALLEN’S NEXT CHOICE IS The Deer Hunter, the 1978 film about three Pennsylvania steelworkers and best friends who are drafted to fight in Vietnam. In the movie’s most famous scene, Vietnamese captors force Robert De Niro and Christopher Walken to play Russian roulette. Allen, who has been sitting on her couch, moves to a leather armchair and pulls it closer to the TV.
De Niro is screaming, trying to get Walken to do the unthinkable: aim a half-loaded revolver at his own head and pull the trigger. De Niro knows that playing the game is their only chance for survival, so he is relentless. “You’re going to die, motherfucker!” he shrieks when Walken hesitates. “Go ahead!”
Walken balks again, and one of his captors shouts an order while another slaps him across the face. With every slap, Allen flinches slightly. The corners of her mouth turn down. Her eyes glisten. Walken lifts the gun to his temple. Allen bites her lip and raises her left hand to her mouth.
Walken fires — click! — and the hammer strikes an empty chamber. It is De Niro’s turn, and in a blur, he uses the gun to kill the Vietcong in the room. Allen clears her throat and takes a breath.
“This was another moment for me of saying ‘Oh my God, I have never, ever seen anything like this,” she says. “I remember being at the movie theater with my boyfriend at the time. I’d never had such a visceral response to anything in my life. I remember thinking that the gun was at my head.”
Allen was living in Chicago then, having been invited by a college friend, John Malkovich, to join Gary Sinise, Terry Kinney, Laurie Metcalf, and others in the Steppenwolf Theater Company.
“I don’t know what I would have done if he hadn’t called and asked me to do a show with him,” Allen says of Malkovich. “I was acting, but I was a small-town girl. I think I would have been too intimidated to really go for it by myself. But it was ideal for me to go from one family, my own family, into another family, which is what Steppenwolf was.”
Within Steppenwolf, The Deer Hunter’s grittiness was something to emulate. “We all responded to it. It blew everybody away,” Allen says, grimacing at her choice of metaphor. She rewinds the tape, wanting to look at an earlier, similar scene in which De Niro coaxes his other boyhood friend, played by John Savage, to aim a bullet at his own head.
“One of the reasons I love this scene so much” — her voice is a whisper — “is that there’s so much love underneath what De Niro is doing,” she says as Savage fires, grazing his skull and drawing blood. The camera turns to De Niro, who has tears in his eyes. “How he talks his friend through it. The look in his eyes. The love, the strength, the anger. All these things he has going on. He is just staggering.”
Allen’s best performances — on both the stage (she won a Tony for Broadway’s Burn This) and the screen — are elaborate constructions, layer upon subtle layer. Though often they appear repressed, her characters conceal unexpected passions: A timid housewife indulges herself by shoplifting (The Ice Storm); a straitlaced ’50s supermom’s desires are awakened by art (Pleasantville); a crone covets the very sensuality that threatens her (Ethan Frome).
