Gary Allen

Allen's career got its earliest documented foothold with *The Wicked Die Slow* in 1968 — and it's worth pausing on that one, because he didn't just show up to act. He co-created the film, wrote the original screenplay, and starred as 'The Kid' (IMDb). That kind of creative ownership at the start of a career is unusual, and it suggests someone who wasn't waiting around for the phone to ring. Through the 1970s, he built a filmography that ranged from the unsettling to the prestigious. *The Sentinel* (1977) cast him as Malcolm Stinnett, and that same year he appeared in Woody Allen's *Annie Hall* — a film that won four Academy Awards and remains one of the most-discussed American comedies ever made. *Alice, Sweet Alice* (1976) put him in the company of a film that's since become a genuine cult horror title. He wasn't headlining these pictures, but he was in them, which matters. The early 1980s brought *Buddy Buddy* (1981), the Billy Wilder comedy starring Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau, and *Mommie Dearest* (1981), the Joan Crawford biopic that has never quite escaped its camp reputation — though Allen's involvement kept him working across very different registers of Hollywood filmmaking. *Fright Night Part 2* (1988) extended his run into genre territory, and then the Coen Brothers' *The Hudsucker Proxy* (1994) gave him what may be his most critically durable credit outside of *Annie Hall*. A career spanning roughly 1968 to 1994 in documented major releases, with the full scope of his television and smaller-screen work not comprehensively catalogued in available sources (IMDb, Rotten Tomatoes).