Jonelle Allen

Jonelle R. Allen, born July 8, 1948, in New York City, is an American actress, singer, and dancer whose career has spanned Broadway, film, and television. Raised in the Sugar Hill section of Harlem, she is the only child of Marion, a postal worker, and Robert Allen, a New York City transit worker. Allen began performing at the age of four and trained at the Professional Children's School. As a child, she made recurring appearances on the local children's television program The Merry Mailman, hosted by Ray Heatherton.

Allen's Broadway career began at age six with The Wisteria Trees, Joshua Logan's Americanized adaptation of The Cherry Orchard, which starred Helen Hayes. She subsequently returned to Broadway in a revival of Finian's Rainbow. Before her Broadway work in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Allen was part of the original off-Broadway cast of Hair at Joseph Papp's Public Theater in 1968. Her Broadway credits also include George M!, the comedy Small War on Murray Hill, and A Celebration of Richard Rodgers. Her most celebrated stage role came with Two Gentlemen of Verona, in which she starred and for which she received a 1972 Tony Award nomination for Best Actress in a Musical. That performance also earned her the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Performance, a Theatre World Award, and recognition from the New York Drama Critics' Circle and the Outer Critics Circle, all in 1972.

Allen's film work includes Come Back Charleston Blue (1972), Cotton Comes to Harlem, The River Niger (1976), and The Hotel New Hampshire. Her performance in The River Niger earned her an NAACP Image Award. She also appeared in the horror comedy film The Midnight Hour, in which she played Lucinda Cavender, a vampire witch, and in the 1975 television movie Cage Without a Key, starring Susan Dey, in which she portrayed a lesbian prison inmate. In 2017, Allen appeared in The Divorce, released on Amazon, and in 2020 she played Felicia Richardson in the serial audio drama Forever and a Day, becoming a main cast member by the show's third season.

On television, Allen was a series regular on the NBC soap opera Generations from 1989 to 1991, playing the flamboyant and outspoken Doreen Jackson, and on Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman from 1993 to 1998, where she portrayed Grace, an entrepreneurial café owner in the Old West. Prior to Generations, she played Stacey Russell, an ambitious salesgirl-turned-boutique-manager, on the short-lived prime-time soap Berrenger's. Her additional television appearances include All in the Family, Barney Miller, The Love Boat, Match Game, Trapper John M.D., Hill Street Blues, Cagney and Lacey, ER, and Girlfriends.

Allen portrayed legendary Harlem jazz figure Florence Mills in Harlem Renaissance at the 2007 Edinburgh Festival Fringe. She later developed an updated version of that one-woman show in collaboration with Stevi Meredith and David Jayden Anthony. In 2017, she starred in Hello, Dolly! and Donald B. Welch's Secret Garden at Saddleback College, where she has also headed the New Works/Staged Reading Projects. Her work there includes directing and writing productions she describes as plays with music, among them an adaptation of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol and The Journey, both created with composer David Jayden Anthony.

Allen has been married three times. She married John Sharpe on December 19, 1978, and the couple divorced in 1992. Her second marriage, to Richard Grimmon, lasted from January 9, 1998, until 2001. She was most recently married to Leigh Eaton from 2003 until his death in 2020.