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Allen was born at MCAS Cherry Point, North Carolina to Mary Jo (Allen) and Joe Marsh. By 17 he'd attended eight schools in six states. Undistinguished academically and athletically, his chief extracurriculars were music and drama. He appeared in high school productions of West Side Story (1961) and The King and I (1956), "in juvenile roles, since I was youngest in the class." He was drama club president Senior year; an administration notable for doing "absolutely nothing -- we didn't even do a play that year."
He briefly attended Concordia College (now University) in St. Paul before enlisting in the Air Force, training at Lackland AFB and Goodfellow AFB, Texas. He was assigned first to the 548th RTG at Hickam AFB, Hawaii; then to the Joint Intelligence Center Pacific at Pearl Harbor; and was honorably discharged after a final year at Offutt AFB, Nebraska. Returning to civilian life, he found work in sales, construction, graphic design, as a radio announcer, a church secretary, a closed-captioning editor, a medical transcriptionist, and a flight attendant. He married Lori Wyatt in 1996 and the couple had two daughters.
While working at a hotel in Springfield, Missouri, he realized he missed the theatre and decided, on a whim, to audition for a play, ending up cast in a stage production of You Can't Take It with You (1938) "mostly because they needed a xylophone player, and I play piano, which was close enough." He continued to appear in plays, independent films, and commercials across the Midwest before relocating to Los Angeles in the summer of 2010.
Allen's most recent appearance is as German rare book dealer Jonas Eckhard in Strange Harvest (2024). Other notable roles include a holographic spokesman in Ariana Grande's Brighter Days Ahead (2025); Dr. Neal Elattrache on Ryan Murphy's American Sports Story (2024); and Paper Moon (1973) screenwriter Alvin Sargent on The Offer (2022) opposite Josh Zuckerman and Colin Hanks.
