After completing her Juris Doctor at the USC Gould School of Law, she became a member of the State Bar of California.
While at university, she entered a campus contest and won first prize, lunch with Stanley Jaffe, an executive at Columbia Pictures.
[2] She then joined Universal as an executive vice-president of production, and worked on Along Came Polly, Erin Brockovich and the American Pie and Bourne series.
[2] Shearmur also worked for two years at Paramount as co-president of production, where she was responsible for the studio's literary productions such as The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, The Spiderwick Chronicles, Stop-Loss, Zodiac, Dreamgirls, Charlotte's Web, Nacho Libre, and Failure to Launch.
[2] Allison Shearmur developed lung cancer and died from the disease at the age of fifty-four on January 19, 2018, at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles.