Born October 5, 1951 in Carrollton, rural southern Illinois, Karen Jane Allen is an American actress best known for her role as Marion Ravenwood in Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008). Allen has also had roles in films including National Lampoon’s Animal House (1978), The Wanderers (1979), Cruising (1980), Starman (1984), Scrooged (1988), The Sandlot (1993), and Poster Boy (2004).
Karen is the daughter of Patricia Allen, a teacher, and Carroll Thompson Allen, an FBI agent. She is of English, Irish, Scottish and Welsh descent. Allen spent her first ten years travelling around the country with her parents and two sisters. After she graduated from DuVal Senior High School, in Lanham, Maryland, at 17, she moved to New York City to study art and design at Fashion Institute of Technology. She later attended the University of Maryland, College Park, and spent time travelling through South and Central America. In 1974, Allen joined Shakespeare & Company in Massachusetts and, three years later, moved back to New York City and studied at the Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute.
In 1978, she made her major film debut in National Lampoon’s Animal House (1978) and Hollywood took notice. Her career-changing role came with the blockbuster hit Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), directed by Steven Spielberg, in which she played the feisty heroine Marion Ravenwood, love interest of Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford). Allen won a Saturn Award for Best Actress for her performance. After a few minor films, including leading roles in the dramatic thriller Split Image (1982), directed by Ted Kotcheff and the Paris-set romantic drama Until September (1984), directed by Richard Marquand as well as other stage appearances, she co-starred with Jeff Bridges in the science-fiction film Starman (1984). After that, her movie career waned, as she preferred to work on the stage.
Allen debuted on Broadway in the 1982 production The Monday After The Miracle. In 1983, she played the lead in the off-Broadway play Extremities, a physically demanding role about a would-be rape victim who turns the tables on her attacker. She often took breaks from movie roles to concentrate on stage acting, although Allen appeared as Laura in the Paul Newman directed film version of the Tennessee Williams play The Glass Menagerie, with John Malkovich and Joanne Woodward, in 1987.
Allen reprised her best-known role as Marion Ravenwood for the 2008 sequel Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, in which she renews her relationship with Indiana Jones and reveals to him that they have a son named Henry Jones III, who named himself Mutt Williams, played by Shia LaBeouf.
In 1988, Allen married actor Kale Browne and gave birth to a son Nicholas in 1990. The couple divorced in 1998. After she gave birth, she accepted smaller roles in TV and films in order to concentrate on raising Nicholas. Given her affinity for knitting, in 2003, she started her own textile company, “Karen Allen Fiber Arts,” in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, for which she was awarded an honorary master’s degree from The Fashion Institute of Technology, in their 2009 Commencement Exercises. She also teaches acting at Bard College at Simon’s Rock, which is located in Great Barrington. She currently lives in Monterey, Massachusetts.
Karen Allen Photo Gallery
