Allison Anders

Allison Anders

Active - 1987 - 2022  |   Born - Nov 16, 1954   |   Genres - Drama, Comedy, Crime

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Biography by AllMovie

The hardships encountered and overcome by director Allison Anders are often reflected in the grittiness and strength of her feminine characters, lending a reality to her stories that is refreshing.

Born in Ashland, KY, Anders, her mother, and her four sisters were abandoned by her father when she was just five. At age 12 she was sexually assaulted and later was abused by her stepfather. At age 15 her mother took her and her sisters to Los Angeles to escape further abuse. Unable to deal with the trauma, Anders spent time in mental wards and later foster homes and jail. By the time she was in her early twenties, Anders had lived on a commune, been to London where she bore her first daughter, and returned to Los Angeles where, after attending junior college and working odd jobs, she enrolled in U.C.L.A. During that time, Anders had her second daughter. She graduated from the university's distinguished film school with an industry fellowship and due to a dedicated personal correspondence campaign aimed at Wim Wenders, her favorite director, managed to get a job as an assistant on his 1984 film Paris, Texas. Three years later she wrote and directed her first feature, Border Radio, with the assistance of a couple former classmates from film school, Dean Lent and Kurt Voss. She made her solo directorial debut in 1992 with Gas, Food, Lodging, the story of a trailer park mother and her adolescent daughters. The following year, Anders made Mi Vida Loca (My Crazy Life), an unflinching exploration of the girl gangs of Echo Park, the L.A. neighborhood where Anders lives. She next provided a vignette in the anthology film Four Rooms (1994). Her entry, about a coven of witches who seduce a bellboy in hopes of harvesting a vital bodily fluid for a ritual held in a rundown hotel, was considered one of the weakest. Anders did much better with her 1996 feature, Grace of My Heart, a fictional autobiography during the 1960s that was very loosely based on the life of singer/songwriter Carole King.

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