The return of Karen Allen

I was really excited to see the Karen Allen is back in the new Raiders movie - I thought she was one of the best things about the first one, and her absence was a big part of what was wrong with the sequels (the female characters became more and more peripheral in each subsequent film). I went to imdb to see what she's been up to, and she's worked steadily for all these years, though often on TV, and she has many other accomplishments as well:

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000261/bio

Apart from acting, Karen Allen is also an accomplished singer, songwriter and musician (she played in a band with Kathleen Turner, and recorded a duet with Jeff Bridges for the Starman (1984) soundtrack album). She also writes plays, screenplays and poetry, owns her own Astranga Yoga enterprise and runs a knitting business at her Berkshire Mountains farm.

Here's a nice (and recent) piece from the LA Times; her comments at the end [in response to the question about why she doesn't appear in more films] are especially great:

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/movies/la-ca-allen18-2008may18,0,3715000.story

"I was in that kind of real weird transitional period there," she said, asked about removing herself to this country idyll permanently. "I was in my late 40s, early 50s, and it's a strange little place that you can fall into."

These days all somebody has to do is Google you and they know how old you are. I would show up for roles that were written for somebody in their early 50s, and people would say, 'You can't do that, you look too young,' but if I showed up for a role for somebody in their early 40s then the people would say, 'Well, but she's 50.'"

I'm from a generation of fantastic actresses. It's a big pool of really wonderful actresses, and so many of them we never even get to see on the screen anymore."