SHE WAS Boone's girl Katy in "Animal House," and this was enough to cement her in the collective conscience of a certain kind of male. This male was 13 when the National Lampoon comedy was released, in 1978; what he has retained in his mind's eye about Karen Allen are the freckles and long brown hair and big eyes, at once inviting and a little cool.
So what happened to her? It as much to ask: What is the trajectory of a culture that has gone from Karen Allen to Jessica Alba?
Hers was a naturalistic beauty that seems synonymous with the 1970s and so missing these days, in what is advertised on screen as young and beautiful. She was simultaneously materially attractive and subtext: In "Animal House," when Boone catches her post-coitus with their English professor, it made sense; a girl like that would go off with older men, abandoning the boyfriend for needing his toga.
Did she quit Hollywood or did Hollywood quit her? We mean, after 1981's "Raiders of the Lost Ark," and that nakedly classical opening salvo: "Indiana Jones. I always knew someday you'd come walking back through my door." There was, less remembered now, 1984's "Starman," in which she played another loner tough girl -- this one visited by an outer-space creature (Jeff Bridges).
But at some point she went to go knit in the Berkshire Mountains. There was also a marriage followed nine years later by divorce, and single motherhood that would, in concert with the dwindling Hollywood career and the shock of 9/11, prompt her to quit Manhattan permanently for the Berkshires.
