Nancy Allen

Nancy Allen is an American actress born on June 24, 1950, in the Bronx borough of New York City, the youngest of three children of Florence and Eugene Allen, a police lieutenant. She grew up on 196th Street in the Pelham Bay section of the Bronx and attended the Academy of Mount St. Ursula before her family relocated to Yonkers. As a child, Allen studied dance, later attending the High School of Performing Arts for one year before enrolling at Jose Quintano's School for Young Professionals.

Allen's first major film appearance came in Hal Ashby's The Last Detail (1973), in which she played a nervous date opposite Jack Nicholson. That experience prompted her to relocate to Los Angeles to pursue acting. Her breakthrough came when she was cast as Christine Hargensen, the chief antagonist in Brian De Palma's horror film Carrie (1976). She followed that with a role in Robert Zemeckis's directorial debut, I Wanna Hold Your Hand (1978), produced by Steven Spielberg, and then appeared in Spielberg's own 1941 (1979). Allen married De Palma on January 12, 1979, and continued working with him on Home Movies (1980) and Dressed to Kill (1980), in which she portrayed a prostitute who witnesses a murder. That performance earned her a Golden Globe nomination for New Star of the Year. Her final collaboration with De Palma was Blow Out (1981), in which she played a woman implicated in an assassination captured on audio by a sound engineer.

The year 1984 brought two notable releases: The Buddy System, opposite Richard Dreyfuss and Susan Sarandon, and The Philadelphia Experiment, opposite Michael Paré, for which Allen received a Saturn Award nomination for Best Actress. She and De Palma divorced that same year. In 1983, she had starred in Strange Invaders, written by Bill Condon, playing a supermarket tabloid reporter alongside Paul LeMat, Michael Lerner, and Louise Fletcher. Allen also hosted the documentary Terror in the Aisles (1984), which featured clips from horror films including Carrie and Dressed to Kill.

Allen achieved mainstream recognition with her portrayal of police officer Anne Lewis in Paul Verhoeven's RoboCop (1987), a role that earned her another Saturn Award nomination for Best Actress. She reprised the character in RoboCop 2 (1990), for which she studied martial arts and underwent police training to make the role more physically demanding, and again in RoboCop 3 (1993), receiving a Saturn Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress for the latter. Additional credits from this period include Abel Ferrara's television film The Gladiator, Poltergeist III (1988), and Limit Up (1990), in which she played commodities trader Casey Falls alongside Ray Charles and Danitra Vance. In 1990, she also starred in Memories of Murder, the first original film produced for the Lifetime television network. Allen married comedian Craig Shoemaker on September 6, 1992; they divorced in 1994.

In 1994, Allen appeared in the French drama Les patriotes and reunited with Strange Invaders writer Bill Condon for the television movie The Man Who Wouldn't Die, in which she played psychic Jessie Gallardo opposite Roger Moore. The following year, she made her Broadway debut in a 1995 production of Dial M for Murder, Frederick Knott's play that had served as the basis for Alfred Hitchcock's film adaptation. Allen played Margot alongside John James as Tony Wendice and Roddy McDowall as Inspector Hubbard. Directed by Edward Hastings, the production ran from September 26, 1995, to March 10, 1996.

Allen married builder and contractor Randy Bailey in June 1998. That same year, she appeared as Midge in Steven Soderbergh's crime thriller Out of Sight, starring George Clooney and Jennifer Lopez. In 1999, she appeared in Children of the Corn 666: Isaac's Return and Kiss Toledo Goodbye with Christopher Walken.

Allen stepped back from acting in 2008 and became involved in cancer support work. In 2010, she was named executive director of the weSPARK Cancer Support Center in Los Angeles.