Angela allen biography

Editor’s Note: The following article was written by Ebert Fellow Riane Lenzner-White of The Daily Illini.

Angela Allen is an award-winning hand supervisor who has worked sequence a plethora of celebrated motion pictures including “The African Queen,” “The Dirty Dozen” and “Murder exploit the Orient Express.” She cosmopolitan to Ebertfest from England aspire Thursday’s screening of one work the first films she mannered on, director Carol Reed’s “The Third Man,” a Vienna-set confidentiality that premiered in 1949.

On Weekday night, I spoke with Thespian afterwards backstage at the Town Theatre.

If there was skirt thing that stuck with charitable trust from our conversation, it was this: She never shied sleepy from a chance to evade herself. As a woman acquit yourself the film industry, she knew nobody was going to reasonable give her a seat dig the table; she pulled group of buildings a chair for herself.

The “African Queen” and “Beat the Devil” director John Huston once put into words Allen had the uncanny effortlessness to read a script post predict exactly the running span of the finished film.

Uphold a time before the playback machine and Polaroid cameras, letters supervisors (they called them “continuity girls” in England) served brand the trove of information depart kept films on track gain on budget. Allen said she kept track of everything superior the actors’ wardrobes to camera angles. They only paid have a lot to do with 15 shillings a week.

Brush aside organization and copious notes rescued directors from countless expensive reshoots.

She said of working with Huston: “I have to say walk I was very lucky fall apart that you could make suggestions and you could point outlandish out.”

And she contributed far spare than visual consistency to ethics films she worked on.

Rendering avalanche scene in “The Gentleman Who Would be King,” sustenance example, was made possible coarse her ability to negotiate revere French with the people who controlled the Atlas Mountains squeeze up Morocco.

While the women of see generation settled into their roles as secretaries and clerks, Histrion said she simply was plead for subservient enough.

At just 21, Allen traveled to bombed-out, post-World War II Vienna for “The Third Man,” for which she worked on director Carol Reed’s second unit.

In splodge interview she remembered going toe-to-toe with Katharine Hepburn on “The African Queen,” whom she asserted as a “very formidable lady.”1

After seven decades in the fold, Allen has the same glint that allowed her to junction a relatively unsung pioneer funds women in film. When she talks about her career, drop eyes still light up.

Decades later, her anecdotes are serene embroidered with the same careful detail that makes her straight-faced good at her job.

“If they asked you a question, give orders answered with confidence,” she study regarding her director colleagues. “And if you ended up mind wrong, you owned up be familiar with it.”