GREAT BARRINGTON, MASS. — She WAS Boone's girl Katy in "Animal House," and this was enough to cement her in the collective conscience of a certain kind of male. This male was 13 when the National Lampoon comedy was released, in 1978; what he has retained in his mind's eye about Karen Allen are the freckles and long brown hair and big eyes, at once inviting and a little cool.
So what happened to her? It as much to ask: What is the trajectory of a culture that has gone from Karen Allen to Jessica Alba?
Hers was a naturalistic beauty that seems synonymous with the 1970s and so missing these days, in what is advertised on screen as young and beautiful. She was simultaneously materially attractive and subtext: In "Animal House," when Boone catches her post-coitus with their English professor, it made sense; a girl like that would go off with older men, abandoning the boyfriend for needing his toga.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Sunday, May 25, 2008 Home Edition Sunday Calendar Part E Page 2 Calendar Desk 1 inches; 47 words Type of Material: Correction
Karen Allen: Last week's Sunday Calendar profile of actress Karen Allen said her ex-husband Kale Browne was a regular on the ABC soap "Another World." The show was on NBC. Additionally, the article said "King of the Hill" was Steven Soderbergh's second film. It was his third.
Did she quit Hollywood or did Hollywood quit her? We mean, after 1981's "Raiders of the Lost Ark," and that nakedly classical opening salvo: "Indiana Jones. I always knew someday you'd come walking back through my door." There was, less remembered now, 1984's "Starman," in which she played another loner tough girl -- this one visited by an outer-space creature (Jeff Bridges).
But at some point she went to go knit in the Berkshire Mountains. There was also a marriage followed nine years later by divorce, and single motherhood that would, in concert with the dwindling Hollywood career and the shock of 9/11, prompt her to quit Manhattan permanently for the Berkshires.
She had done summer theater in Stockbridge, Mass.; she felt at home there. With her Hollywood money she'd purchased an 18th century barn and remade it; the place came with its own beaver pond, and Allen added a hot tub. She cleared the attic of bats and made it into a master suite with its own sunken bath and office.
Here the former bohemian girl selling jewelry in Greenwich Village enrolled her son in a Rudolf Steiner school, drawn to its nontraditional methodology (Steiner, the Austrian philosopher and father of biodynamic agriculture, created the Waldorf educational method, with a varied, curriculum in which, for instance, math is "introduced through rhythm and song, and studies of the natural world," according to the school's website).
