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• Born: 1 December 1935
• Birthplace: Brooklyn, New York
• Best Known As: The director and star of Annie Hall

Name at birth: Allen Stewart Konigsberg

Woody Allen's on-screen persona is well known: a comical and brainy New Yorker in nebbishy glasses, nervous about sex, death and modern times. Once a writer for Sid Caesar's Your Show of Shows and a stand-up comic, Allen came into his own in the 1970s as a writer, actor and director in movie comedies like Bananas (1971) and Sleeper (1973). He won a best picture Oscar for his ode to modern love in New York, Annie Hall (1977, with frequent co-star and then-girlfriend Diane Keaton) and has since been considered an important filmmaker. Since the 1980s he has averaged about one movie a year, including serious films such as Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989) and Husbands and Wives (1992), and lighthearted comedies such as Zelig (1983) and Bullets Over Broadway (1994). In 1993 he endured a storm of publicity after leaving his longtime lover Mia Farrow for her adopted daughter, Soon-Yi Previn. The scandal may have turned off filmgoers, but it didn't slow down Allen's movie making. His films since then have included Small Time Crooks (2000, with Tracey Ullman), Anything Else (2002, starring Christina Ricci) and Match Point (2005, with Jonathan Rhys Meyers and Scarlett Johansson). Allen is also an accomplished jazz clarinetist, a hobby featured in the 1998 documentary Wild Man Blues.

• Birth Name: Allen Stewart Konigsberg
• Genre: Soundtrack
• Active: '60s - '90s
• Instruments: Vocals, Clarinet

Biography

Before he emerged as one of the foremost American filmmakers of the 20th century, Woody Allen was a stand-up comic. Although his tenure as a performing comedian was relatively short-lived, its importance to the development of his later work was pivotal; on stage and on record, Allen honed to perfection the uniquely neurotic and uniquely New York sensibility which became the hallmarks of his career as an actor, writer and director, firmly establishing the self-deprecating, awkward persona which long defined him in the eyes of the moviegoing public.

Woody Allen was born Allen Stewart Konigsberg in Brooklyn, New York on December 1, 1935. After adopting his stage name at the age of 17, in 1953 he enrolled in New York University's film program, quickly failing the course "Motion Picture Production" and dropping out of school to begin writing for comedian David Alber for the sum of $20 a week. Two years later, Allen graduated to writing for television, working on the staff of the legendary Your Show of Shows as well as penning material for Pat Boone.

During his five-year tenure in television, his efforts won him an Emmy nomination, but like Mel Brooks, Allen found a career as a writer stifling, and eventually decided to try his hand as a performer. He made his professional debut in 1960 at the Blue Angel club in Manhattan; success came slowly, and the first major published review of his act did not appear until two years later. However, his comic worldview was different and fresh, and his talents soon caught the eye of television booking agents; beginning in 1963, Allen became a frequent talk show guest, and by the following year he recorded his self-titled debut LP, a litany of regrets about his marriage, collegiate years and stint playing Little League.

Woody Allen Volume 2, a collection of ambitious comic tales, followed in 1965, although by this point Allen was already losing interest in the stand-up form; that same year, he made his film debut in the comedy What's New, Pussycat?, which he also wrote. For all intents and purposes, his career as a stage comedian -- a period he later admitted was wracked with fear and self-doubt -- ended with the release of 1968's Woody Allen Three; a year later, the success of the feature Take the Money and Run (which he wrote, directed, and starred in) guaranteed him a future as a filmmaker. By 1977's Academy Award-winning Annie Hall, Allen stood as one of the truly monumental talents of his time, a position solidified by later masterpieces including 1979's Manhattan, 1986's Hannah and Her Sisters and 1989's Crimes and Misdemeanors. His longtime interest in playing jazz was the subject of the 1998 documentary Wild Man Blues as well as its accompanying soundtrack. ~ Jason Ankeny, All Music Guide

Stand-Up Comic: 1964-1968 Buy this CD

Nightclub Years 1964-1968 Buy this CD

• Born: Dec 01, 1935 in Brooklyn, New York
• Occupation: Actor, Writer, Director
• Active: '70s-2000s
• Major Genres: Comedy, Comedy Drama
• Career Highlights: Crimes and Misdemeanors, Hannah and Her Sisters, Annie Hall
• First Major Screen Credit: What's New Pussycat? (1965)

Biography

Actor, director, screenwriter, and playwright Woody Allen redefined film comedy during the 1970s, bringing a new measure of sophistication and personal complexity to the form. His movies -- intimate meditations on recurring subjects such as art, religion, and romance -- put a knowing, confessional spin on the anxieties of contemporary audiences, telescoping their fears and concerns through his own mordantly neurotic onscreen persona. Drawing universal insight from the traditions of Yiddish humor, Allen established himself both as a comic Everyman and one of American filmmaking's true auteurs, writing and directing features which broke with established narrative conventions and infused the screen-comedy form with unprecedented substance and depth.

Born Allen Stewart Konigsberg in Brooklyn, NY, on December 1, 1935, he adopted his stage name at the age of 17, and in 1953 enrolled in New York University's film program, quickly failing the course "Motion Picture Production" and soon dropping out of school to begin writing for comedian David Alber for the sum of 20 dollars a week. Two years later, Allen graduated to writing for television, working on the staff of the legendary Your Show of Shows, as well as penning material for Pat Boone. During his five-year tenure in television, his efforts won him an Emmy nomination, but like Mel Brooks, Allen found his writing career stifling, and he eventually decided to try his hand as a standup performer. After slowly gaining a reputation on the New York-club circuit, he became a frequent talk show guest and in 1964 issued his self-titled debut comedy LP.

In 1965, Allen made his film debut, writing and starring in the Clive Donner farce What's New, Pussycat?; he also continued his standup career, but his interest in live performance was clearly waning. With 1966's What's Up, Tiger Lily?, a puckish re-tooling of a Japanese spy thriller complete with his own story line and dubbed English dialogue, he made his directorial debut. After appearing in the 1967 James Bond spoof Casino Royale, his rise to fame continued when his play Don't Drink the Water was produced on Broadway. In 1969 Allen directed two short films for a CBS television special: Cupid's Shaft, a satire of Charlie Chaplin's City Lights, and an adaptation of Pygmalion in which he appeared as a rabbi. However, Allen's career as a filmmaker fully took flight with the gangster send-up Take the Money and Run (1969), in which he starred, co-wrote, and directed. His status as an auteur was further solidified with 1971's Bananas and the following year's episodic Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask). Allen next appeared in Herbert Ross' 1972 feature Play It Again, Sam, followed by his own return to the director's chair for 1973's futuristic comedy Sleeper. While remaining as outlandish as his previous work, 1975's period comedy Love and Death signaled Allen's desire for respect as a serious filmmaker; a satire of the Napoleonic wars, it included numerous references to history, Russian culture, and movies and was clearly intended as more highbrow comedy than any of his previous work.

Allen's breakthrough was 1977's Academy Award-winning Annie Hall; bittersweet and deeply personal, it established a new kind of comedy -- soul-searching and sophisticated, even the film's nonlinear narrative was experimental, with Allen's character Alvy Singer frequently turning to the camera to address the audience. A major commercial hit as well as a critical success, Annie Hall announced a new era of intelligence and complexity in American comedies, but Allen himself subsequently turned away from humor completely with 1978's Interiors, a brooding drama inspired by the films of his hero Ingmar Bergman. While earning a pair of Oscar nominations, the feature received wildly mixed reviews, with many attacking Allen for selling out his comic genius in a half-hearted bid for artistic respectability.

With 1979's Manhattan, however, Allen's comic impulses and his desire for respect met halfway, and the results were remarkable; an autobiographical ode to his beloved New York City set against the music of George Gershwin, the film, luminously shot in black-and-white, was widely hailed as a masterpiece, and remains his definitive work. Its follow-up, 1980's Stardust Memories, recalled Federico Fellini's 8 1/2 in its depiction of a filmmaker torn between his audience's desire for comedy and his own aspirations toward more fulfilling work. Bergman -- along with William Shakespeare -- was again the inspiration behind 1982's A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy, the first of Allen's films to star new paramour Mia Farrow; his fascination with his own celebrity continued with 1983's Zelig, a technical tour de force combining new material with vintage newsreel footage.

After 1984's Broadway Danny Rose, Allen mounted the superb The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985), a tribute to Buster Keaton's landmark Sherlock, Jr. The next year's brilliant Hannah and Her Sisters won favorable comparisons to Chekhov, and earned Allen his second Oscar for Best Original Screenplay. The following year, he released Radio Days, his most sweetly comic effort in years; however, he subsequently entered into another Bergman-like phase, directing two back-to-back 1988 dramas -- September and Another Woman -- which failed to find favor with audiences or critics. The penetrating Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989), on the other hand, ended the decade on a high note, scoring three Academy Award nominations.

In the 1990s, Allen settled comfortably into the role he'd begun assuming during the previous decade; working with limited budgets, he made exactly the films he wanted to make regardless of current trends, with a steady and dependable cult audience to keep his career successfully afloat. Both 1990's Alice and 1992's Shadows and Fog were negligible at best, but he returned to form with Husbands and Wives, a cinéma vérité look at a crumbling marriage. The reality of the film soon became apparent when he and Farrow suffered a very public breakup in the wake of revelations that Allen had begun dating Farrow's adopted daughter Soon-Yi Previn (whom he later married); a bitter custody fight ensued, with Farrow alleging that Allen had also molested another of their children.

In the wake of his personal turmoil, Allen returned to filmmaking, enlisting former lover (and Annie Hall star) Diane Keaton for 1993's Manhattan Murder Mystery. In 1994, he returned to critics' good graces with the period comedy Bullets Over Broadway, which garnered an impressive seven Oscar nominations, while 1995's Mighty Aphrodite scored two more Academy nods. In 1996, Allen directed his first-ever musical comedy, Everyone Says I Love You, which found some favor with audiences and generally positive reviews from critics. However, Deconstructing Harry followed in 1997 to vehemently mixed reviews, as did 1998's Celebrity, leading many critics to wonder if Allen was entering another phase -- one that appeared to be decidedly mean-spirited -- in his long and varied career.

Almost in direct response to these sentiments, Allen released a string of lighthearted films, beginning with the critically acclaimed Sweet and Lowdown in 1999. A mock-docudrama look at a Django Reinhardt-like jazz musician -- played to frustrating perfection by Sean Penn -- the film garnered some of Allen's best reviews in years, and snagged Oscar nominations for Penn and his preternaturally talented co-star Samantha Morton. After Lowdown, Allen entered into a multi-picture deal with DreamWorks Pictures -- his most significant alliance with a studio since his fruitful collaboration with Orion throughout the 1980s. 2000's Small Time Crooks, a modestly scaled comedy evoking Born Yesterday and Big Deal on Madonna Street, was the first of these pictures, enjoying a healthy run at the box office and decent reviews. Though Allen wasn't as lucky with the noir comedy Curse of the Jade Scorpion (2001) or his moviemaking farce Hollywood Ending, the latter film opened the 2002 Cannes Film Festival and marked the first time the New York City native made a red-carpet appearance in the south of France.

Allen's next pair of films, Anything Else and Melinda and Melinda, continued his trend mixed-reviewed comedies, but in 2005, he delivered what many considered his best work in years with the dark drama Match Point. Starring Scarlett Johansson and Jonathan Rhys Meyers, the picture netted a Oscar nod for best original screenplay, Allen's first nomination in nearly a decade. Perhaps hoping she might be his lucky charm, the filmmaker cast Johansson again in the following year's mystery-comedy Scoop. ~ Jason Ankeny, All Movie Guide

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Woody Allen (born 1935) has been one of America's most prominent filmmakers, with a series of very personal films about the subjects that have always obsessed him: sex, death and the meaning of life.

"If I sat down to do something popular, I don't think I could," Woody Allen told interviewer Stephen Farber in 1985. "I'm not making films because I want to be in the movie business. I'm making them because I want to say something." When Allen was one of America's most popular stand-up comedians, his fans might have mocked those words, coming from a man whose first role models were Bob Hope and Groucho Marx.

Allen's own films have been made on modest budgets in New York City, where he lives, with no concessions to studio taste or control. Despite the growing seriousness of his work, audiences have never lost sight of Allen the performer and the character he created for himself in his days as a comedian: a nerdy neurotic whose only defense against a hostile universe is his sense of the absurd, which he fearlessly directs at any and all targets, beginning with himself. A very private man, Allen has reluctantly become a public figure, but through all the changes and controversies, "The Woodman" has remained a symbol of uncompromising integrity to his loyal fans. On that subject, he told Farber, "I never hold them cheaply … I never write down to them … I always assume that they're at least as smart as I am, if not smarter, and … I try to do films that they will respect."

Woody Allen was born Allen Konigsberg on December 1, 1935, in the Bronx and grew up in Brooklyn. He changed his name to Woody Allen when at age 17 he began submitting jokes to a newspaper column, eventually attracting the attention of a publicist who hired him to write gags for his clients. After graduation, Allen enrolled in New York University as a motion picture major and then in night school at City College, but dropped out of both to pursue his career as a comedy writer. Years later he told his biographer Eric Lax that when a dean recommended he "seek psychiatric help" if he ever wanted to get a job, he replied that he was already working in show business. "Well, if you're around other crazy people," the dean conceded, "may be you won't stand out."

Fortunately, Allen had a remarkable gift for his chosen profession. In a recent New Yorker article, Adam Gopnik recalled, "Woody was famous among his contemporaries for possessing a pure and almost abstract gift for one-liners … that could be applied to any situation, or passed on to any comic, almost impersonally." Before he turned 20 Allen had sold 20,000 gags to the New York tabloids, married his childhood sweetheart Harlene Rosen and landed a job in the writer's development program at NBC. By the time he turned 23 he was writing for the network's biggest comedy star, Sid Caesar, and had signed with talent managers Jack Rollins and Charles Joffe, who would later produce his films. He had also hired a tutor from Columbia University to teach him literature and philosophy at home.

At the urging of his new managers, Allen began performing his own material in a small New York nightclub in 1960. Honing his craft in painful encounters with the audience night after night, six nights a week, he struck a gold mine of comedy material when he and Rosen divorced in 1962. (His jokes about his ex-wife eventually led to a law suit from Rosen that was settled out of court.) By this time Allen was beginning to appear on network television and was a hit at Greenwich Village's legendary coffee house, The Bitter End.

Unlike other comics of the time, who favored political humor, Allen made jokes about his own comic persona, the little guy tormented by big philosophical issues and his unfailing hard luck with women. This fact was appreciated by a New York Times reviewer, who called him "the freshest comic to emerge in many months."

National recognition was not long in coming. Success in clubs and on television led to a Grammy-nominated comedy album, Woody Allen, in 1964, followed by Woody Allen, Volume Two in 1965 and The Third Woody Allen Album in 1968. Allen's humor found a more up-scale outlet when he began writing humorous essays in the style of S. J. Perelman for the New Yorker in 1966. Three collections of these essays have been published: Getting Even, Without Feathers, and Side Effects.

Allen had long been a lover of movies, American and foreign, but the first one he wrote and acted in, What's New, Pussycat? (1965), was a bad experience. Recruited to write a comedy for hip young audiences, he found the experience of sixties-style, big-budget improvisational filmmaking appalling. "I fought with everybody all the time," he told Cinema magazine. "I hated everyone, and everyone hated me. When that picture was over, I decided I would never do another film unless I had complete control of it." But the film made a fortune and established Woody Allen as a "bankable" movie talent.

True to his word, he made his directorial debut with a film so modest that no one ever thought to tamper with it. Released by AIP, a company specializing in low-budget action and horror films, What's Up, Tiger Lily? (1966) was a Japanese James Bond movie with new dialogue composed of dream-like one-liners put into the characters' mouths by Allen and some friends. "All we did was put five people in a room and keep them there improvising as the film ran," Allen told Rolling Stone. Truly for the young and hip, Tiger Lily didn't make as much money as Pussycat, but it acquired an enduring cult following.

Besides the release of Tiger Lily, 1966 was also the year of Allen's marriage to actress Louise Lasser, who supplied one of the voices for Tiger Lily, and the Broadway opening of his first play, Don't Drink the Water, a comedy about an Jewish American family on vacation who get in hot water behind the Iron Curtain. Don't Drink the Water ran for over a year and spawned a movie directed by Howard Morris; Allen directed a television remake of Don't Drink the Water in December 1994. The marriage to Lasser ended in divorce after three years, but they remained friends, and she acted in Allen's first three hit comedies: Take the Money and Run (1969), Bananas (1971), and Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex but Were Afraid to Ask (1972).

Allen's early comedies, made for United Artists - a company that gave him complete control of his work as writer-director - recall the messy, anything-goes style of classic American comedies built around such free-wheeling talents as the Marx Brothers and W. C. Fields. Like the Marx Brothers, a reviewer for Time magazine wrote, Allen was ready "to subordinate everything - plot, plausibility, people - to the imperative of a good joke."

Perhaps because it demanded a more controlled style, he entrusted the film version of his second Broadway hit, Play It Again, Sam (1972), to veteran director Herbert Ross. But he played the lead himself, as he had done in the stage version of this romantic comedy about a man who fulfills his dream: to play the last scene of his favorite movie, Casablanca, in real life, with himself in the Bogart role. His co-star on stage and in the film was his new off-screen friend and romantic partner, Diane Keaton.

Keaton and Allen also co-starred in the two films written and directed by Allen which mark the end of his "early, funny" period. In Sleeper (1973), Allen's character wakes up from a cryogenic sleep to find himself trapped in a future society that looks suspiciously like Los Angeles. And in Love and Death (1975), which Allen considers his best comedy, he takes on his favorite themes in an epic satire of all of Russian literature.

It was Keaton's talents as an actress that inspired Allen to make his first serious film, a bittersweet comedy about a failed romance between two neurotics, and it was undoubtedly her personality that inspired him to create the title character, Annie Hall (1977). (She won an Oscar for her performance; the film won a total of four of the prized gold statuettes.) "What is Woody Allen doing starring in, writing and directing a ruefully romantic comedy that is at least as poignant [distressing] as it is funny and may be the most autobiographical film ever made by a major comic?" asked Time magazine. "What he is doing is growing, right before our eyes, and it is a fine sight to behold."

Keaton went on to star for Allen in Interiors (1978), and Manhattan (1979), a somber black-and-white film about cheating New Yorkers which ends with a salute to the last scene of Charlie Chaplin's City Lights. His career as a serious filmmaker had definitely begun.

Annie Hall also marked the beginning of a nine-picture collaboration with cinematographer Gordon Willis in which Allen's growing mastery of film-making techniques enabled him to create a new style for each new film. He imitated the style of Italian director Federico Fellini in his next, most controversial film, Stardust Memories (1980), in which he plays a filmmaker who seems to hate his fans. Despite the ensuing hue and cry, Allen told an Esquire interviewer in 1987, "The best film I ever did, really, was Stardust Memories."

When the executives who had given him artistic control of his work left United Artists and founded Orion Pictures, Allen worked off his contract with UA and joined them. Coincidentally, the move to Orion also marked the beginning of his collaboration with his new off-screen partner, actress Mia Farrow. Their first four films together all have a fairy-tale quality: A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy (1982) mixes fairies and moonstruck lovers on a country estate; Zelig (1983) uses special-effects wizardry to tell the story of a human chameleon who achieved a peculiar kind of fame in the 1920s; Broadway Danny Rose (1984) transforms present-day New York into a never-neverland of show-business losers for a poignant romance between a brassy beauty and a hapless agent, and The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985) darkens the fairy-tale mood when a hero of the silver screen steps down into real life, with tragic consequences for a Depression-era housewife, touchingly played by Farrow.

Hollywood bestowed three Oscars on their next collaboration, Hannah and Her Sisters, in which Hannah (Farrow) is divorced from a hypochondriac, played by Allen, and married to a philanderer, played by Michael Caine. "Tracking the career of Woody Allen is exhausting but exhilarating," began the New York Times review of Hannah. "Just when we reach the top, another peak appears." But Allen, who told Eric Lax that "the whole concept of awards is silly," was worried by the film's success. "When I put out a film that enjoys any acceptance that isn't mild or grudging," he explained to Lax, "I immediately become suspicious of it."

After Radio Days (1987), a light-hearted look at Allen's childhood and the Golden Age of radio, the mood of his films darkened again. September (1987) replays the grim psychological dramas of Interiors, and Another Woman (1988) pairs Farrow with one of America's greatest actresses, Gena Rowlands, in a story of mid-life crisis. Allen briefly returned to comedy in the short Oedipus Wrecks (1989), about a man whose problems with his mother take a supernatural turn. He then made his most pessimistic film to date, Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989), in which a respectable married man (Martin Landau) murders his mistress (Anjelica Huston) and gets away with it, while Allen's character loses the woman he loves (Farrow) to a shallow fool (Alan Alda).

Before their off-screen relationship ended in a bitter child-custody suit, Allen and Farrow made three more films together: Alice (1990), a fairy tale recalling their early collaborations, in which a neglected housewife discovers love and life with the help of a Chinese herbalist who dispenses magic potions; Shadows and Fog (1992), a comic salute to the novels of Franz Kafka set in a Middle European country out of some German silent film, and Husbands and Wives (1992).

Released in a firestorm of publicity over the custody battle, Allen's last film with Farrow had the press looking for parallels to Allen's real-life romance with Farrow's 21-year-old adopted-daughter, Soon-Yi Farrow Previn. It also marked another new beginning for Woody Allen the film-maker. Orion's impending bankruptcy obliged him to make the film for Tri-Star, while a less controlled style of filming, with a hand-held camera scampering to keep up with the actors, brought a new sense of life to this savagely funny contemporary look at marriage and infidelity. "It's a good movie," observed the reviewer for New York magazine, "yet a decade or so may have to pass before anyone can see it in itself."

The hand-held camera still wobbles noticeably in Manhattan Murder Mystery, which reunites him with Diane Keaton, playing a married couple who suspect their next-door neighbor of murder. A pure comedy, Allen's first in many years, Manhattan Murder Mystery was a pit-stop for the filmmaker and his loyal fans before his 1994 film Bullets Over Broadway, the critically acclaimed melodrama set in the 1920s that focuses on a group of old Broadway stereotypes. He continued with comedy in 1995, releasing Mighty Aphrodite, a contemporary tale of a man obsessed with his adopted son's mother interspersed with scenes parodying Greek tragedy. The next release, Everyone Says I Love You, surprised his cast and fans alike, marking the director's first foray into musicals. Reports noted that he waited until two weeks after the film's stars signed their contracts to mention that he was making a musical, and that he chose actors who were not necessarily musically trained on purpose in order to evoke more honest emotion in the songs. Reviews were mixed.

Allen's interest in music extended to his off-screen life as well - starting in 1997, he regularly began playing clarinet for the Eddy Davis New Orleans Jazz Band every Monday at a club in New York City. Despite his diverse talents, however, Allen in real life can demonstrate his neurotic tendencies that are trademarks in his films. He told Jane Wollman Rusoff on the "Mr. Showbiz" web site, "I've never made a movie where scholars sat around and said, 'This ranks with the greatest.' … It's a goal, but the trick is to have a great vision. That's not so easy."

Further Reading

Lax, Eric, On Being Funny: Woody Allen and Comedy, New York, 1975.

Yacowar, Maurice, Loser Take All: The Comic Art of Woody Allen, New York, 1979; rev. ed., 1991.

Palmer, M., Woody Allen, New York, 1980.

Jacobs, Diane, … But We Need the Eggs: The Magic of Woody Allen, New York, 1982.

Brode, Douglas, Woody Allen: His Films and Career, New York, 1985.

Pogel, Nancy, Woody Allen, Boston, 1987.

Sinyard, Neil, The Films of Woody Allen, London, 1987.

McCann, Graham, Woody Allen: New Yorker, New York, 1990.

Lax, Eric, Woody Allen, New York, 1992.

Groteke, Kristi, Mia & Woody, New York, 1994.

Björkman, Stig, Woody Allen on Woody Allen, New York, 1995.

Blake, Richard Aloysius, Woody Allen: Profane and Sacred, Metuchen, New Jersey, 1995.

Perspectives on Woody Allen, edited by Renee R. Curry, New York, 1996.

Christian Science Monitor, January 24, 1997.

Life (New York), 21 March 1969.

Esquire (New York), 19 July 1975.

Rolling Stone (New York), 16 September 1993.

Esquire (New York), October 1994.

For more information on Woody Allen, visit Britannica.com.

(Allen Stewart Konigsberg), 1935–, American actor, writer, and director, one of contemporary America's leading filmmakers, b. Brooklyn, N.Y. Allen began his career writing for television comedians and performing in nightclubs. His early film comedies, which often depict neurotic urban characters preoccupied with sex, death, and psychiatry, include Sleeper (1973) and Annie Hall (1977; Academy Award, best picture). Much of Allen's later work in comedy and drama explores these themes as well as a sophisticated New Yorker's various other preoccupations.

Among his later films are the stylish Manhattan (1979); Broadway Danny Rose (1984), a New York comedy; the probing family drama Hannah and Her Sisters (1986; Academy Award, best screenplay); the 1930s comedy Radio Days (1987); the searing Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989); Husbands and Wives (1992), a bittersweet domestic drama; the romantic and partly musical Everyone Says I Love You (1996); and the fictional jazz biography Sweet and Lowdown (1999). His 21st-century works include three comedies, Small Time Crooks (2000), Hollywood Ending (2002), and Anything Else (2003), and the tragicomedy Melinda and Melinda (2005), none of which achieved the critical and popular plaudits earned by many of his earlier films. Allen changed his venue to the city of London for Match Point (2005), a tale of wealth, lust, crime, and luck that won wide acclaim and did much to revive his flagging reputation, and again used the city as the setting for the comedy Scoop (2006). Allen has also written humorous prose pieces, many published in The New Yorker magazine, and plays. In 1992, in a bitter public dispute, Allen left Mia Farrow for her adopted daughter and sued the actress for custody of their children and lost (1993).

Bibliography

See biographies by E. Lax (1991), J. Baxter (1999), and M. Meade (2000); studies by D. Jacobs (1982), F. Hirsch (rev. ed. 1990), S. B. Girgus (1993), and D. Brode (1997); Woody Allen on Woody Allen (1995); documentary film Wild Man Blues (1998), dir. by B. Kopple.

A twentieth-century American comic author. Since the late 1960s, he has been directing films and acting in them, usually playing a neurotic, bookish New Yorker (see New York City). Some of his best-known films are Annie Hall, Manhattan, and Hannah and Her Sisters.

Quotes:

"What if everything is an illusion and nothing exists? In that case, I definitely overpaid for my carpet."

"What if nothing exists and we're all in somebody's dream? Or what's worse, what if only that fat guy in the third row exists?"

"I don't respond well to mellow, you know what I mean, I have a tendency to... if I get too mellow, I ripen and then rot."

"I will not eat oysters. I want my food dead -- not sick, not wounded -- dead."

"More than any time in history mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness, the other to total extinction. Let us pray that we have the wisdom to choose correctly."

"In Beverly Hills... they don't throw their garbage away. They make it into television shows."

See more famous quotes by Woody Allen