by Hans J. Wollstein
biography
An imposing six feet, 200-pound character actor who appeared in several Lois Weber productions in the 1910s (including the evocatively titled The Price of a Good Time, 1917), Alfred Allen later portrayed General Pershing in the propaganda melodrama The Kaiser, the Beast of Berlin (1918) and was General George Meade in the low-budget The Dramatic Life of Abraham Lincoln (1924). Busiest in the 1910s, when he would make an average of ten films a year, Allen found his career waning in the 1920s. Retired at the advent of sound, the former character actor returned to films in the early '30s, but only in bit parts.
