- Joan Allen worked in theatre, television and film during her early career, and achieved recognition for her Broadway debut in Burn This, winning a Tony Award for Best Performance by a Leading Actress in a Play in 1989.
- Joan Allen co-produced the movie Pushers Needed by Arclight Films in 2005.
- Joan Allen has received three Academy Award nominations; she was nominated for Best Supporting Actress for Nixon (1995) and The Crucible (1996), and for Best Actress for The Contender (2000).
Allen and Tobey Maguire played mother-and-son roles for both the movies Ice Storm and Pleasantville. - Joan, the youngest of four children, was born in Rochelle, Illinois, the daughter of Dorothea Marie (née Wirth), a homemaker, and James Jefferson Allen, a gas station owner.
- Joan Allen stands five feet and ten inches tall. She is left-handed.
- Allen has an older brother, David, and two older sisters, Mary and Lynn.
- Joan Allen took a job as a secretary at an educational film company in order to pay her bills.
- Joan became a member of the Steppenwolf Theatre Company ensemble in 1977 when John Malkovich asked her to join.
- In 1989, Joan Allen won a Tony Award for her Broadway debut performance in Burn This. She also starred in the Pulitzer Prize-winning play The Heidi Chronicles.
- In 2001, Allen starred in the mini-series The Mists of Avalon on TNT and earned an Emmy nomination for the role.
- Joan Allen received Academy Award nominations for Best Supporting Actress for her roles as Pat Nixon in Nixon (1995) and as Elizabeth Proctor, a woman accused of witchcraft, in The Crucible (1996). Adams was also nominated for Best Actress for her role in The Contender (2000), in which she played a politician who becomes the object of scandal.
- In 1990, Joan Allen married actor Peter Friedman. They separated in 2002, but live close to each other to share time with their daughter, Sadie, born in 1994.
- Joan played CIA Department Director Pamela Landy in The Bourne Supremacy and The Bourne Ultimatum. Allen appeared in a remake of the film Death Race, playing a prison warden.
Interesting facts about Joan Allen
