Early life, education and career

Born in New York City, Allen was raised in the Sugar Hill section of Harlem. The only child of Marion, a postal worker, and Robert Allen, a NYC transit worker, Allen began performing at the age of four, and attended the Professional Children's School.^[2] She made her Broadway debut at the age of six in The Wisteria Trees, Joshua Logan's Americanized adaptation of The Cherry Orchard, starring Helen Hayes.^[3][4] As a child, she also made regular appearances on a local children's television series, The Merry Mailman, hosted by Ray Heatherton.^[3][4]

Career

Allen returned to Broadway in a revival of Finian's Rainbow. She was in the cast of the original off-Broadway 1968 production of Hair at Joseph Papp's Public Theater,^[4] and also appeared in George M! before receiving critical acclaim and a Tony Award nomination for Two Gentlemen of Verona, which earned her New York Drama Critics' Circle, Drama Desk, Theatre World, and Outer Critics Circle Awards for her performance.^[4] Despite her success, it proved to be her last Broadway appearance to date.

Allen's film credits include Cotton Comes to Harlem, The Hotel New Hampshire, and The River Niger, for which she won an NAACP Image Award. Other television appearances include Match Game, Barney Miller, The Love Boat, All in the Family, Trapper John, M.D., Hill Street Blues, Cagney and Lacey, ER, and Girlfriends. Allen portrayed a lesbian prison inmate in the 1975 television movie Cage Without a Key, which starred Susan Dey.

Her most notable roles are Grace, the entrepreneurial café owner in the Old West, that she played for seven years on Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman,^[5][4] as well as the flamboyant and outspoken Doreen Jackson on the NBC soap opera Generations, and Lucinda Cavender, the vampire witch in the horror comedy film The Midnight Hour. Before Generations, she played ambitious salesgirl-turned-boutique-manager Stacey Russell on the short-lived prime-time soap Berrenger's.^[4] Allen appeared as legendary Harlem jazz queen Florence Mills in Harlem Renaissance at the 2007 Edinburgh Festival Fringe.

More recently, Allen has headed the New Works/Staged Reading Projects at Saddleback College, and is writing and directing new shows which Allen calls "plays with music", which have been presented at Saddleback, notably an adaptation of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol and The Journey, both with composer David Jayden Anthony.

In 2017, Allen appeared in the film The Divorce, released on Amazon, and starred in Hello, Dolly at Saddlebacks CLO. The same year, she starred in Donald B. Welch's Secret Garden, and worked on an updated version of her Florence Mills one-woman show, written with collaborators Stevi Meredith and David Jayden Anthony.

In 2020, Allen appeared as Felicia Richardson in the serial drama Forever and a Day. Originally starting as a recurring character, by season three Allen became a main character in the audio drama.