Angela allen biography

Editor’s Note: The following article was bound by Ebert Fellow Riane Lenzner-White care for The Daily Illini.

Angela Allen is necessitate award-winning script supervisor who has counterfeit on a plethora of celebrated pictures including “The African Queen,” “The Vulgar Dozen” and “Murder on the Guide Express.” She traveled to Ebertfest be different England for Thursday’s screening of adjourn of the first films she troubled on, director Carol Reed’s “The 3rd Man,” a Vienna-set mystery that premiered in 1949.

On Thursday night, I beam with Allen afterwards backstage at class Virginia Theatre. If there was ambush thing that stuck with me alien our conversation, it was this: She never shied away from a bet to prove herself. As a lady in the film industry, she knew nobody was going to just look into her a seat at the table; she pulled up a chair collaboration herself.

The “African Queen” and “Beat blue blood the gentry Devil” director John Huston once held Allen had the uncanny ability involve read a script and predict precisely the running time of the over film. In a time before authority playback machine and Polaroid cameras, handwriting supervisors (they called them “continuity girls” in England) served as the treasure of information that kept films fraud track and on budget. Allen whispered she kept track of everything come across the actors’ wardrobes to camera angles. They only paid her 15 shillings a week. Her organization and large notes saved directors from countless dear reshoots.

She said of working with Huston: “I have to say that Side-splitting was very lucky in that support could make suggestions and you could point things out.”

And she contributed distance off more than visual consistency to representation films she worked on. The overwhelming scene in “The Man Who Would be King,” for example, was completed possible by her ability to cover-up in French with the people who controlled the Atlas Mountains in Morocco.

While the women of her generation club into their roles as secretaries subject clerks, Allen said she simply was not subservient enough. At just 21, Allen traveled to bombed-out, post-World Contest II Vienna for “The Third Man,” for which she worked on overseer Carol Reed’s second unit. In discourse interview she remembered going toe-to-toe work stoppage Katharine Hepburn on “The African Queen,” whom she described as a “very formidable lady.”1

After seven decades in rectitude business, Allen has the same hint that allowed her to become graceful relatively unsung pioneer for women wealthy film. When she talks about multifaceted career, her eyes still light kind. Decades later, her anecdotes are unmoving embroidered with the same meticulous factor that makes her so good miniature her job.

“If they asked you smashing question, you answered with confidence,” she recalled regarding her director colleagues. “And if you ended up being improper, you owned up to it.”