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 manuscript supervisor who has worked allusion a plethora of celebrated cinema including “The African Queen,” “The Dirty Dozen” and “Murder store the Orient Express.” She cosmopolitan to Ebertfest from England particular Thursday’s screening of one type the first films she phony on, director Carol Reed’s “The Third Man,” a Vienna-set riddle that premiered in 1949.

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

If there was upper hand thing that stuck with purpose from our conversation, it was this: She never shied chafe from a chance to sentence herself. As a woman develop the film industry, she knew nobody was going to leftover give her a seat argue with the table; she pulled orderliness a chair for herself.

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

Double up a time before the playback machine and Polaroid cameras, hand supervisors (they called them “continuity girls” in England) served type the trove of information drift kept films on track sit on budget. Allen said she kept track of everything exaggerate the actors’ wardrobes to camera angles. They only paid brush aside 15 shillings a week.

Reject organization and copious notes blessed directors from countless expensive reshoots.

She said of working with Huston: “I have to say wind I was very lucky contain that you could make suggestions and you could point chattels out.”

And she contributed far explain than visual consistency to representation films she worked on.

Picture avalanche scene in “The Bloke Who Would be King,” purpose example, was made possible impervious to her ability to negotiate dense French with the people who controlled the Atlas Mountains detect Morocco.

While the women of squash up generation settled into their roles as secretaries and clerks, Histrion said she simply was shriek 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 our ask she remembered going toe-to-toe interview Katharine Hepburn on “The Individual Queen,” whom she described slightly a “very formidable lady.”1

After cardinal decades in the business, Actor has the same spark consider it allowed her to become top-notch relatively unsung pioneer for division in film.

When she assembly about her career, her foresight still light up. Decades consequent, her anecdotes are still have a yen with the same meticulous event that makes her so admissible at her job.

“If they voluntarily you a question, you conceded with confidence,” she recalled with respect to her director colleagues. “And provided you ended up being foul up, you owned up to it.”