JOAN ALLEN

Joan Allen answers her bell before the elevator in the hallway can shut its doors. She is wearing jeans, a sky blue pullover, black leather slippers, and no makeup. She is tall--five feet ten--and delicate, with long, slender fingers. Her wavy blondish-brown hair is still wet from the gym. Her eyes, what most people remember about Allen, are big, expressive, and the color of slate, and they stand out against her pale, clear skin. Allen invites me into the Upper West Side apartment where she lives with her husband, actor Peter Friedman, and their six-year-old daughter, Sadie. In the kitchen, Midnight, a small green parrot, squawks from a wooden perch. Her husband's allergies, Allen says, prevent them from having a dog or a cat, and "a fish you can't hold." She slices a few cherry tomatoes for the bird, pours some water for us, and heads for the living room.

    Sheepishly, Allen admits she has agonized over what she calls her "assignment." Before settling on three favorite scenes, she says, she considered and rejected numerous films: Being There, starring Peter Sellers ("I loved his whole performance and couldn't pick just one scene"); Glengarry Glen Ross ("It was a scene about listening, with Al Pacino"); A Streetcar Named Desire, with Marlon Brando ("When I first saw it, I thought, 'Who knew this existed?'"); and Klute, starring Jane Fonda ("It had a big impact on me--her sessions with the shrink, and in the end, when the camera is just on her and she's cornered and the tears are just falling down her face").

    Allen has always been drawn to tortured characters, two of whom--Elizabeth Proctor in The Crucible and Pat Nixon in Nixon--earned her Oscar nominations in 1996 and 1997. So it is not entirely a surprise that the first scene she feeds the VCR is a monologue from the 1962 film version of Long Day's Journey into Night. Katharine Hepburn plays the dope-addicted wife of a pompous actor (Ralph Richardson), and she is telling her maid about how she and her husband met. Reclining in a rocking chair, an addled Hepburn turns suddenly girlish as she recalls her own beauty and her husband's charm. Then, just as suddenly, she falls to her knees. "What's so wonderful about the first meeting between a silly, romantic schoolgirl and a matinee idol?" Hepburn asks bitterly.

    "I was probably 15 or 16 when I saw this, and I just couldn't believe it. I just said, 'Whoa. Not everything is fine,'" says Allen, now 44. "I grew up in a family that was very loving and wonderful but had a very traditional, authoritarian structure. So I probably wanted to express more than I felt was acceptable. This movie opened up a whole new world."

    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).

    In her most recent film, The Contender, Allen plays a nominee for vice president of the United States whose confirmation is threatened by a sex scandal. She has a lot of threads to weave together--ambition, confidence, vulnerability, competence, pride. But to watch her as she faces her detractors, sitting erect and unflinching in a congressional hearing room, is to believe she actually could be on Air Force Two.

    "This notion of what does a thought look like on somebody's face--it's challenging, because it's not anything that you're conscious of when it's happening. It becomes, I think, very tricky because you are working from yourself. And how many yous are there?" she says. "When I was in my twenties, I thought, 'I can play this part and that part.' I played Linda Loman in Death of a Salesman when I was in college, with gray streaks in my hair. It was insane. How could I possibly know what it was like to have her life? It was a great thing to go through, but now I would say, 'Oh my God.' I'll read a script and I'll say, 'You know, somebody else would be better for this role than me.'

    "The older you get, it's kind of weird, but somehow you realize how much harder it is to be a good actor than you used to think it was. I remember hearing that phrase from Sandy Meisner, the acting coach--you know, 'It takes 20 years to be an actor'--when I was in my twenties. And I said"--she snorts--"'What is he talking about? Who is he?' And now, on the other side of it, I see what he means."
   
    Midnight screams from the kitchen. Allen rises and returns with the bird on her finger. "Step up, Midnight," she says, trying to cajole the parrot into its cage. Midnight resists, so she lets it stay perched on her pointer.

    "What I've been able to do, fortunately, for a long time is believe in the situation when I'm doing it," Allen says. "I just believe it. I don't tend to do sense-memory work, thinking of something that really made me cry in order to cry. That takes me out of what's happening. I tend to have this ability to just believe what's on the page."

    For Nixon, Allen read biographies and studied a Barbara Walters interview to master Pat Nixon's mannerisms. For last year's When the Sky Falls, which was released in Europe but so far not in the United States, she read the work and visited the office of slain Irish journalist Veronica Guerin. The details that most enriched Allen's portrayals, though, were those she learned about her characters' childhoods.

    "I just think it informs the adult you become," she says, finally easing Midnight into its cage. "It's amazing--and I haven't really talked about this with anybody but a couple of friends--but I find the older I get, the more I become myself. The more I'm me, the less I change. I changed in my twenties and thirties, but then you sort of go back and become, sometimes, more who you are, what you always were."

    A perfect segue to her third choice, the 1985 film The Trip to Bountiful, in which Geraldine Page plays an elderly woman who decides to take one last journey to the place she was raised, Bountiful, Texas.

    "I know I'm going to cry," Allen warns. "My parents grew up in an area that looks very much like this on the Mississippi River," she says as the scene--of Page finally reaching her family's abandoned farmhouse--begins to play. "We went back to visit the old house where my mother grew up before they tore it down, and it looks like this house."

    A weary Page sits on what was once her family porch, listening to the calls of redbirds, a sound she hasn't heard for years. "Ever since we got here, I've had half a feeling that my father and my mother would come out of this house and greet me and welcome me home," Page tells the stranger who's driven her on the last leg of her trip. "I guess when you've lived longer than your house and your family, you've lived long enough."

    Allen's eyes are wet. She ducks into the kitchen to blow her nose.

  "It's such an unvain performance. She's got that body, that dress, that sagging chest. It's so real," Allen says, returning to the couch. "She says a line at one point about a woman she knows--'Callie Davis kept her farm going'--and in one line you get how she feels about that woman. That kind of acting is so thorough and so important because everybody in your life you have a specific relationship with. You can tell by the tone of your voice how you feel. When I hear an actor do something like that, I just think, 'I've got to remember to do that.'"

    I thank Allen. As I am packing to go, she says there is one more scene she almost included. It's from Terms of Endearment. Debra Winger is in the hospital, telling her two young sons good-bye. The older one knows his mother is dying.

He is sullen. He doesn't want to be there, as if by not acknowledging her imminent death he can will her to survive.

    "She's amazing in that scene because she's not sentimental about it," Allen says. "She strikes a balance. She says something like 'Someday you're really going to regret and feel bad that this happened between you and me. And I'm telling you right now--don't.'"

    Allen's voice is fierce, and her eyes are full. I realize that after two hours of talking with her about acting, I am getting to see her act. "She's saying, 'Don't. I know that you love me. I know.'" A tear travels down Allen's cheek. "She just keeps saying that. She wants to free him. 'Don't regret that I'm dead.' It's just"--she pauses a moment, her voice again a whisper--"beautiful."