[4][5] Allen made her Broadway debut at the age of six in The Wisteria Trees, Joshua Logan's Americanized adaptation of The Cherry Orchard, starring Helen Hayes.

[citation needed] Allen's film credits include Cotton Comes to Harlem, The Hotel New Hampshire, and The River Niger, for which she won an NAACP Image Award.

Other television appearances include Match Game, Barney Miller, The Love Boat, All in the Family, Trapper John, M.D., Hill Street Blues, Cagney and Lacey, ER, and Girlfriends.

[6] Her most notable roles are Grace, the entrepreneurial café owner in the Old West, that she played for seven years on Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman,[7][5] as well as the flamboyant and outspoken Doreen Jackson on the NBC soap opera Generations, and Lucinda Cavender, the vampire witch in the horror comedy film The Midnight Hour.

The same year, she starred in Donald B. Welch's Secret Garden, and worked on an updated version of her Florence Mills one-woman show, written with collaborators Stevi Meredith and David Jayden Anthony.