A Supremacy All Her Own

By Belinda Luscombe

If womanhood is a continuum, with Ruth Bader Ginsburg on one end and Jessica Simpson on the other, Joan Allen occupies a sparsely populated middle position: the dignified babe. It's a precarious perch, and not just because it seems such an oxymoron. It's dangerous, at least for an actress, because Hollywood doesn't know what to do with you. Or rather it knows exactly what to do with you: you play the wife. The nice but uptight wife.

Allen, then, has been much married. To Anthony Hopkins' Nixon in Nixon. To Daniel Day-Lewis' John Proctor in The Crucible. To Kevin Kline's cheating spouse in The Ice Storm, to John Travolta's FBI agent in Face/Off and to William H. Macy's George in Pleasantville. Not the worst husbands in the world, but, sheesh, enough. Allen would never say "sheesh," but she put her foot down. "More than anything, I felt like the vein had collapsed--like if you were a junkie," she says of the spousal roles. "There's no more to give. I'm not interested in it. I want to be seen differently, and I just feel like I've given as much as I can."

Truth to tell, Allen's not even a wife in real life anymore. After more than 12 years of marriage, she and her actor husband Peter Friedman (Paycheck) quietly separated about 18 months ago. "It's amicable," she says simply. In that time, perhaps not coincidentally, she has been doing a lot of work. Allen is currently in two certifiable hits, The Notebook and The Bourne Supremacy. In neither is she the star, but in each she helps distinguish the movie as more than generic. She's upper crust but not unfeeling as the mom in the weepie Notebook, and serene and superconfident as the senior CIA official who gets Matt Damon's Jason Bourne in her sights.

The latter role required a lot of staring into computers and barking down the phone. "Call me back in 20 [minutes], and when I ask you where we stand, I had better be impressed," she tells one of her flunkies. But she brings a touch of heart to her hypercompetence. She's not vulnerable, but neither is she unassailable. "We needed a strong, precise antagonist," says producer Frank Marshall. "Joan brings that. But she brings compassion too."

It was harder work than Allen anticipated. "I thought it was going to be sort of a lark, and a kind of genre, and easy, and it was one of the most difficult performances I've ever done," Allen says, "because of the confusion, because of the feelings that she's feeling but maybe she's not showing because she's a person in the CIA. I found it much more layered than I had ever imagined it." She also had to talk herself into being authoritarian. "I had to bolster myself to believe I knew what to do."

There are other things Allen has to talk herself into doing. No extrovert, she regards interviews, awards shows and public appearances as part of her job, and just like the good small-Illinois-town girl she is, she performs them with vigor. But not with any joy. She has been nominated for three Academy Awards but hasn't found the Oscars a life-changing event. "It feels like an evening of business," she says. "On the years when I'm not there, I'm sitting at home going, 'I'm so glad.'" She's careful to work her babe traits, wearing for an interview supertight jeans and a snug top with flirty ties at the shoulders. She's as thin as an iron poker and sits twice as straight. Hers is a serene face, on which even small emotions register. She smiles a lot but leaves you in no doubt she would rather be somewhere with Sadie, 10, her daughter. Asked to describe herself, she says, "I'm a working mom."

Most working mothers, however, do not inspire the kind of admiration that has had not one but two filmmakers write roles specifically for them. In 2000, newbie director Rod Lurie wrote The Contender for Allen. She got to become Vice President in that film. She also got to know Mike Binder (he played her communications director), who wrote a romance for her, The Upside of Anger, due out in December. Her love interest is Kevin Costner, who at 49 is only two years her senior. It's almost inappropriate.

Partly because one woman's dignified is another man's straitlaced, Allen seems to be on a mission to appear looser. In another upcoming film, Sally Potter's Yes, she's a woman having an affair that crosses racial and religious lines. And finally, the shyest girl in the class is taking on the fastest-talker's job. She's co-producing a film about a group of working-class Irish women who go to Lourdes, France. Her job has been (partly) to get Maggie Smith and Kathy Bates to sign on. "I've never been on the phone so much," she says. "We're behind on preproduction." With that, two movies to promote and a daughter to care for, what Joan Allen really needs is a wife.