 About Alison Larkin
Alison's
Writing Resume
(pdf)
Alison's
Performing Resume - Television, theater, voice work and more...
About Alison
During her very happy childhood with her
English parents, Alison lived in East and West Africa, Washington DC and the South of England.
At seventeen, she traveled throughout Australia, supporting herself by playing her flute in train stations and outside the Sydney Opera House.
At nineteen her first one-act play was produced at the Edinburgh Festival, while she was an English and Drama student at Royal Holloway College, London University.
At twenty-one, she was sent to Hong Kong to head up a magazine. She returned to London a year later to take up her place as a post-grad acting student at the Webber-Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art, where her second one-act play was produced.
After drama school, Alison played several leading roles on the British stage (see resume). She had just written her first full length play, and was playing Flora Poste in Cold Comfort Farm at the Watermill Theatre in Newbury, when
Alison, who was adopted, found out that her birth mother, for whom she had been looking, was alive and well and keen for Alison to come and visit her at her home. In Bald Mountain, Tennessee.
The encounter with the mother who had been forced to abandon her changed Alison’s life forever and within four months of their meeting, Alison had moved to New York City and become a stand-up comic.
Her US career took off quickly and she was soon appearing regularly at The Comic Strip and the Boston Comedy Club in Greenwich Village. Her unusually wide range of voices could be heard in cartoons, movies and commercials nationwide. She appeared on Late Night with Conan O’Brien and also managed to maintain her classical acting career. At the Manhattan Theatre Club, she understudied Allison Janney in New England and Dame Harriet Walter in Three Birds Alighting on a Field. On Broadway she acted with Anthony Sher, playing Elsie in the Royal National Theatre’s Olivier Award-winning production of Stanley at Circle-in-the-Square. After each performance, she would zip up to the Comic Strip to try out new jokes and keep working on her act.
After seeing Alison in performance, Jim Henson
Productions flew her to Hollywood to develop a sitcom for Alison, based on her
comedy. For the next five years she lived in Los Angeles, under studio development contracts
to star in her own sitcom, first with ABC television and later with Fox tv studios and CBS. She co-wrote the pilot for the second Untitled Alison Larkin Sitcom with Emmy award winning comedy writers Gail Parent and Joseph Staretski.
While in Los Angeles, using absolutely none of her classical training, Alison became a popular regular at the Los Angeles Comedy Store, got married to a former rock and roll drummer from New Jersey, made her Las Vegas stand-up comedy debut at The Tropicana, guest starred in Providence and Holding the Baby, and was featured on ABC TV’s Eye on LA as one of LA’s funniest women.
Then Matthew Lloyd, Artistic Director of the Manchester Royal Exchange Theatre in England, read the script of The English American, and invited her to perform the show for a UK audience under his direction.
The English American previewed at the Manchester Royal Exchange Studio theatre in May 2000. Later that year, Alison headlined for a month at the Edinburgh Festival’s Assembly rooms, playing to packed houses and high critical acclaim. She was also very obviously six months pregnant with her first child, which she used to great comedic effect.
Alison took the next three years off from performing while she had another baby, played with her children, and did as much voice work as she had time for.
In May 2004, Alison performed The English American as a highlight of the London Comedy Festival at the Soho Theatre in London, where it was a wildly successful, critically acclaimed hit.
The show has been seen in sold-out concert performance across the US, including
a celebrity attended performance in aid of the Adoption Institute, which was
featured on the back cover of Variety. Her unusually wide range of voices can be heard in Beck and the Great Berry Battle, the recently released Disney/Random House audio book read by Alison. She be heard weekly as the voice of Hermione in the hit cartoon Mike, Lu and Og, as Pauline on Pauline's Perilous Pyramid and she’s the voice of Dog Bug in the Hooked on Phonics series. She co-stars with Annette Bening and Phyllis Diller as the Good Witch of the North in Firesign theatre’s NPR adaptation of The Wonderful World of Oz. She plays several characters in Disney’s animated feature Pocahontas II. Robert Altman, the Coen Brothers, Ted Demme and James Cameron have also made use of her many voices. As a keynote speaker and entertainer Alison appears all over the world. She currently lives
in Northern New Jersey, 25 miles outside New York City, with one tall husband, two small children and one medium-sized laptop computer, on which she completed the first of what she hopes will be many novels.
She has never taken a writing workshop of any kind.
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