Dedicated and adventurous to the core, Joan Allen has won every major theatre award on and off-Broadway, and she has received Oscar nominations for her portrayals of Pat Nixon in Oliver Stone's Nixon and Elizabeth Proctor in Nicholas Hytner's movie of The Crucible. And her film work has also encompassed the pyrotechnics of John Woo's Face/Off, the 1970s excesses of Ang Lee's The Ice Storm, and the surreal social satire of Gary Ross's Pleasantville, in which her character undergoes an unforgettable liberation, of which more anon.
Truly distinctive as each of these performances has been, it's probable that many viewers felt they were watching a different actor in each of those roles, such is the chameleon-like nature of Allen's work and her willingness to conceal her star quality within the beautifully-judged characters she has developed for the screen. Not only does she look significantly different in everything she does, but she also is one of the few who will take the risk of convincingly playing people older than themselves.
It wasn't surprising, then, when we met for lunch in Dublin last week, that Joan Allen only bore a passing resemblance to her onscreen personae - although there is a closer similarity to her most recent character, the Dublin crime journalist based on Veronica Guerin, whom she plays in When the Sky Falls. A bright, articulate and engaging interviewee, she speaks with undisguised affection and enthusiasm for both that character and that film.
For the past three months she has immersed herself in researching and playing the role, so much so that, despite her deep interest in cinema and theatre, she saw only one play (The Freedom of the City) and one movie (An Ideal Husband) during her time in Dublin.
"This is the first time I've played a lead role in a film and I've worked almost every day I've been here," she says. "Every other film I've done has been an ensemble piece and I would work four or five days, then maybe have a week off. So this was a new experience for me.
"What I would tend to do when I got back from the set every evening would be to sit down and immediately open the script for the next day's work. Not to drill and drill, but I'd look at it and daydream about it. Then I might make a phone call and return to reading it again.
"I'm very protective of my time. I would never go out at night if I was working the next day. And over the weekends I would look over the whole week that was coming up and get familiar with what I had to do. That's what I need to do. Every actor is different."
The producers of When the Sky Falls, Nigel Warren-Green, Michael Wearing and Kevin Menton, all of Irish Screen, and journalist Michael Sheridan, who wrote the screenplay, approached Joan Allen in New York a year-and-a-half ago and offered her the role of Sinead Hamilton, the character loosely based on Veronica Guerin. "They came back about a month later and we started talking about her life and about the script", she says. "I just haven't come across a role as strong as this in ages in the States. The more I learned about her life and the more I read the script, I thought it was an amazing story about a remarkable character. She was also a very different character for me to do - a much more extrovert character and a more active character than I had played in the past."
Even though the character has been fictionalised for the purposes of the film, she accepts that playing a role based on a real-life person entails a particular responsibility. "I think it's a bit different than playing someone who is so famous that you feel you have to do some kind of impersonation. She was very famous here and she was known about in the States, but it's not like you're playing, say, Jacqueline Kennedy.
"So there is a degree of difference. But there is a big responsibility in terms of the fact that these are real people and their families are still alive, and I know Veronica was revered here by so many people. And, as an American brought in to play that role, I felt an additional responsibility to really work hard to make it work."
In March of last year, after Joan Allen agreed to star in the film, she came to Dublin to begin researching the part. "Mick Sheridan took me in to see her newspaper office", she recalls, "although she didn't really work from the office. She worked from her car, really, and her mobile phone, wherever she was. I went to the Bridewell police station and met a policeman who has been giving the project the benefit of his support and expertise." She found that the biggest challenge presented by the film was getting into the mindset of a journalist. "That's a foreign concept to me", she says, "the way journalists conduct their lives, the way they have to go after stories and be out there and be exposed and, in her case, be in danger. It was a challenge to understand how a person thinks and lives like that. It's quite different from my personal nature."
But aren't actors investigative in their own way, as they explore and reveal layers in the personalities of the people they play? "Yes", she says, "but it's not like knocking on some criminal's door." Does the film re-enact the notorious confrontation when Veronica Guerin was beaten when she knocked on one criminal's door? It does, she replies, and the criminal is played by Gerard (Mannix) Flynn.
"He is brilliant", she says. "It's a terrific cast. Very fine actors, and they enlightened me tremendously just by being with them and working with them". That cast includes a formidable gallery of villains played by Liam Cunningham, Pete Postlethwaite and Jimmy Smallhorne, with Patrick Bergin as the principal detective and Kevin McNally as the journalist's husband.
The film is directed by John MacKenzie, whose many notable credits include the tough London crime movie, The Long Good Friday, and the gritty recent television series, Looking After Jo Jo. The final screenplay is credited to Michael Sheridan, Ronan Gallagher (who has just completed his first short film) and the New York-based Irish writer, Colum McCann.
Does Joan Allen believe that Veronica Guerin pushed herself too far, or was it that she just didn't realise the danger into which she was putting herself? "I think she just did what she felt she had to do. She loved her job, and I think it was inconceivable to her that a journalist would ever be shot, especially in this city.
"I think she was aware of a sense of danger, but she didn't let that stop her. I think she would be frightened at times, but not to the point where it would impede her from moving forward. She felt strongly that things had gotten way out of control in the city - and that, if the problem wasn't addressed, then the criminals would continue to get more and more powerful, to the point where they would be untouchable."
I asked her how closely her character's death scene is modelled on the real-life events of June 26th, 1996, when Veronica Guerin was murdered at traffic lights on the Naas dual carriageway. "I don't know if I want to give it away, but the scene was very sensitively handled," she says. "It was very emotional for all of us. As soon as you see the red car at the stop light, there's such a sense of finality about it."
Now 42, Joan Allen says that she knew she wanted to act ever since she was 13. There were few opportunities in the small Illinois town of Rochelle, where she was born, until she went to high school and started appearing in plays. She took drama studies at East Illinois University, where one of her fellow students was John Malkovich, and after he and Gary Sinise set up the subsequently much-feted Steppenwolf theatre company in Chicago, they invited her to join them.
"They made me a founder member", she says proudly, "even though I started with them a year after they founded the company. I felt so fortunate to be working with such amazing actors - John Malkovich, Gary Sinise, Glenne Headly, Kevin Anderson, Laurie Metcalf - so many of them."
Her first play with Steppenwolf was Our Late Night. "It was a crazy play by Wally Shawn", she laughs. "It was set at a cocktail party in this New York high-rise building with bizarre, hip people making all these strange passes at each other. There was a big waterbed in the middle of the set and the whole thing was just wild."
She played the dancer whose room-mate has drowned, with Malkovich was the roommate's emotionally unstable brother with whom she gets involved, in a renowned production of Lanford Wilson's Burn This which transferred to Broadway and earned Joan Allen a Tony award. She was nominated for another Tony when she starred in Wendy Wasserstein's Pulitzer Prize-winning play, The Heidi Chronicles, as an art historian and feminist reflecting on and re-enacting the past 30 years of her life.
The cast of The Heidi Chronicles included Peter Friedman, an actor she met in 1983 when Steppenwolf's production of And a Nightingale Sang transferred to New York and Friedman joined the cast. Afterwards she moved permanently to New York, married Friedman and lives there with him and their five-year-old daughter, Sadie.
Joan Allen's early movie roles included two directed by Francis Ford Coppola, Peggy Sue Got Married and Tucker: The Man and His Dream, along with the first Hannibal Lecter film, Manhunter, in which she was the terrorised blind woman, and John Madden's Ethan Frome, as the domineering woman whose husband (Liam Neeson) falls in love with her poor cousin (Patricia Arquette).
In 1994 she was in Los Angeles, taking care of her baby while her husband starred with Jamie Lee Curtis in the movie of The Heidi Chronicles, when her agent told her that Oliver Stone was seeing actors for a top-secret project. "There was a rumour that it was about Nixon", she says. "Everyone was meeting Oliver, so I went along and we talked and he said he might be doing a film that might have a part that might be good for me! And it was left at that.
"Peter finished the film and we came back to New York. Then I got a call that Oliver Stone wanted me to meet and read with an actor, and I wasn't told who it was. There was a rumour that it was Jack Nicholson and a rumour that it was Warren Beatty. So I flew to Los Angeles, went to Oliver's office about eight in the evening - and it was Warren Beatty.
"It was amazing. Here I was. I'd been a mom for a year, just changing diapers and having spit all over me, and then all of a sudden I was in Santa Monica, sitting in an office with Oliver Stone and Warren Beatty. It was like being in the Twilight Zone!
"They proceeded to talk for two or three hours, and I mainly just listened. We never did read, but I always believe that Warren Beatty helped get me that part because in the course of the night he said to Oliver, `You have your Pat Nixon sitting right there. She's the one.' A few weeks later Anthony Hopkins had been cast as Nixon. I read few scenes with him in New York and I got the part.
Joan Allen deservedly received an Oscar nomination for her subtle, telling and touching portrayal of the long-suffering Pat Nixon, a woman for whom she felt a great deal of compassion. "She had such a rough life, came from a very poor background and nursed both her parents through lingering illnesses when she was in her teenage years, and then took care of her father and her brothers after her mother died when Pat was 13.
"When she finally got some freedom she went to New York and became a nurse, and then went back to California to study to be a teacher. And then she met him. It just changed her whole life. He was a very strange man, very stand-offish, and I think she was very lonely."
A year later Allen received her second Oscar nomination for The Crucible, bringing a vivid purity to the character of the pious Elizabeth Proctor. She loved working with Daniel Day-Lewis, who played her farmer husband, John. "I think he's the greatest actor of my generation", she says. "He was incredibly inspiring to me. I think we have some similarities in the way we work, although I don't go as far as he does. There are times when I am on the set when I need to put myself in a cocoon, so I can relate to his way of working."
And she ought to have received another Oscar nomination for Ang Lee's The Ice Storm, in which she caught all the brittleness and anxiety of a woman who simmers with sexual frustration while her husband (Kevin Kline) has an adulterous affair with a hedonistic married neighbour (Sigourney Weaver). "Ang Lee really made that film work", she says. "This was material you could easily dismiss - uptight, WASPy Connecticut people who are totally self-involved - but he made you care so much about these people and their kids and what's going on in their lives. For me, it's like a perfect film."
An action movie might have seemed an unlikely next step for Joan Allen, but she anchored John Woo's Face/Off in human feelings as an understandably confused woman whose FBI agent husband (John Travolta) and a wholly amoral criminal (Nicolas Cage) have switched faces. "It was a great departure for me", she says. "I didn't get to do much of the action stuff, though I did get to break a chair over somebody's back at the end. Just to be involved with a film from such a different genre was really interesting, and John Woo is the gentlest, most gracious man. It really mattered to him that the family story came through in the middle of all the action."
Most recently, Joan Allen extended her range in Gary Ross's Pleasantville, as Betty Parker, an archetypal homely-as-apple-pie 1950s woman whose aforementioned liberation includes discovering the pleasures of masturbation while sitting in her bath. "We giggled a lot about that scene", she says. "Gary Ross put it late into the shooting schedule and we talked around it, but not in any detail until the day we did it. It was a closed set and I was in a wetsuit down to below my knees. I said, `I'm just going to go for it', and I did it. In an odd way it was one of the reasons I wanted to do the film because Betty was a wife and a mother, but there was this side to her that was trying to break through and emerge.
"So many of the scripts I keep getting are for roles which could only be defined in terms of being somebody's wife or somebody's mother, and no more than that. I've done very well recently. When I think of all the talented people I've worked with in the past five years, and the projects and the quality of them, I feel blessed. I really feel blessed.
"But there isn't a lot of good stuff out there for women, and that's one reason I wanted to hold on to When the Sky Falls. In this film I'm a wife and a mother, but I'm a journalist, and that's how you would describe her."