Sian Barbara Allen, an actress best known for her work on The Waltons, has died. She was 78.
Allen’s death was announced in her online obituary, which shared that she died of Alzheimer’s in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, yesterday (March 31), per People magazine.
“Sian was most often cast in roles in which her characters showed great vulnerability and uncommon empathy, which won her a legion of fans all over the world,” her obituary notes.
Allen was born in Reading, Pennsylvania on July 12, 1946 and later studied at Pasadena Playhouse before getting hired as a contract player at Universal Studios.
Some of her earliest professional roles include Gunsmoke, Bonanza and Columbo, but she also went on to appear in Kojak, The Rockford Files, Hawaii Five-0, Baretta, Falcon Crest and L.A. Law, among others.
She notably played Jenny Pendleton in the 1973 Waltons episode “The Love Story,” in which she starred alongside her real-life boyfriend Richard Thomas, who played the show’s John-Boy. She later reprised her role on The Waltons for another episode titled “The Thanksgiving Story.”
Along with her work in front of the camera, Allen had plenty of accomplishments behind the scenes, too, making history in 1978 as the first woman to write a script for Baretta. As her obit notes, she was “a remarkable poet and leaves behind boxes of writing that her family will be able to read for a very long time.”
While Allen stepped away from acting in the late ’90s, she focused more on politics, volunteering for Jackie Goldberg’s 1993 Los Angeles city council campaign and supporting Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers, her obit notes.
Some of her “favorite things” included “family, mystery books, C-SPAN, poetry, all things Ireland, Bob Dylan, Paul Simon’s Graceland album, mac and cheese, root beer floats and bacon cheeseburgers (no lettuce or tomato),” according to her obituary.
Her obit notes that she is survived by her daughter Emily Fonseca (Max Fonseca), sisters Hannah Davie and Meg Pokrass, nephew Miles Bond, ex-husband Peter Gelblum, cousins Marcy, Mike, and Mark Reuben, and grandson her Arlo Fonseca.
