Woody Allen

Film Director

• Born: December 1, 1935
• Place of Birth: Brooklyn, New York

In his comedy performances, short stories, plays, and films, Allen presents himself and his characters as literate, sophisticated, neurotic, and temperamental.

Early Life

The parents of Woody Allen were Orthodox Jews. Martin Konigsberg held many jobs, including jewelry engraver and bartender, while Nettie Cherry was bookkeeper for a florist. Allen grew up in the Flatbush neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York, playing baseball, rooting for the New York Giants, reading comic books, listening to the radio, practicing magic tricks, and hating school. His older cousin, Rita Wishnick, accompanied the boy to films and taught him to appreciate actors. As a teenager, he indulged his passion for jazz by learning to play the clarinet, playing along to recordings by such New Orleans artists as Sidney Bechet and George Lewis.

Allen wrote humorous stories in composition notebooks, and at fifteen he began sending one-line jokes to gossip columnists Earl Wilson and Walter Winchell, who published some of his efforts. He was soon earning twenty-five dollars a week writing jokes for a press agent’s clients. At seventeen he performed his first stand-up routine at a Young Israel social club and legally changed his name to Heywood Allen. In 1953, he married seventeen-year-old Harlene Rosen. Allen attended New York University and the City College of New York briefly before becoming a writer for such television variety programs as The Colgate Comedy Hour and Sid Caesar’s Your Show of Shows. Another of Caesar’s writers, Danny Simon, brother of playwright Neil Simon, became Allen’s mentor, helping him refine his comic technique.

Life’s Work

In 1961, Allen left The Garry Moore Show and a seventeen-hundred-dollar weekly salary to become a stand-up comedian. Borrowing techniques from Bob Hope, Mort Sahl, Groucho Marx, Robert Benchley, and S. J. Perelman, Allen delivered self-deprecating monologues about his neuroses and his bad luck with women. He and Rosen divorced in 1962, and she later sued him for ridiculing her in his act. After producer Charles K. Feldman saw him, Allen was hired to write What’s New, Pussycat? (1965), in which he also appears. His frustrations over lack of control of his screenplay drove him to become a director.

Allen prepared for these duties by making What’s Up, Tiger Lily? (1966), in which he took a Japanese spy film and dubbed it into English with dialogue at odds with what appeared to be happening. One of the voices was provided by actor Louise Lasser, whom Allen married in 1966 and divorced in 1969. During this time, he began writing short stories for the New Yorker and became a playwright, creating Don’t Drink the Water (1966) and Play It Again, Sam (1969). He acted in the latter with Diane Keaton, with whom he became romantically involved and who appears in many of his films.

Allen’s early films were farcical comedies. Take the Money and Run (1969), Bananas (1971), Everything You Wanted to Know about Sex but Were Afraid to Ask (1972), and Sleeper (1973) combined spoofs of film genres with satirical looks at American sex and consumerism. Allen had fun with Russian literature and one of his major obsessions, death, in Love and Death (1975). Finally, with Annie Hall (1977), a bittersweet look at love starring himself and Keaton that captured the complexities of life in the 1970s, he made his first truly mature film. Allen surprised many by following with Interiors (1978), a straight drama in which he does not appear. Deeply influenced by his favorite filmmaker, Ingmar Bergman, Interiors was the first of several Allen dramas, which have not been as well received as his comedies. He ended the decade with another masterpiece, Manhattan (1979), a lush black-and-white ode to the city he loves.

Allen’s best films of the 1980s are Zelig (1983), a mock documentary about a chameleon-like man who mingles with historical figures; The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985), in which a character from a 1930s film leaves the screen to court a real woman; Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), about the domestic problems of three sisters; and Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989), which merges comic and serious looks at adultery. All four starred Mia Farrow, who was romantically involved with Allen and became the mother of his son Ronan in 1987 (the couple never married, but Allen would also legally adopt Farrow's adopted children Moses and Dylan). One of the most controversial aspects of Allen’s life was the breakup of his relationship with Farrow after her discovery in 1992 of his affair with her adopted daughter Soon-Yi Previn, who was then twenty-one years old. An acrimonious custody battle for the couple's adopted children followed, including Farrow's allegations that Allen had sexually molested Dylan when she was seven years old. Allen was not charged with a crime, however, and an investigation found no evidence of abuse. Allen and Previn went on to continue their relationship, and married in 1997.

Critics and his fans noticed a significant overall decline in the quality of his films in the 1990s, with a few exceptions. Some films from this period include Husbands and Wives (1992), Bullets over Broadway (1994), Mighty Aphrodite (1995), and Deconstructing Harry (1997). A series of box office failures followed in the early 2000s, bookended by The Curse of the Jade Scorpion (2001) and Melinda and Melinda (2004). However, he made a successful comeback with Match Point (2005), an unlikely murder tale partly inspired by Fyodor Dostoevski’s Crime and Punishment (1867). Allen made several more films during the 2000s, including Scoop (2006), Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008) and Whatever Works (2009).

In 2010 Allen released You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger to mixed reviews. However, his next effort, Midnight in Paris (2011) was hailed by critics as one of his finest films and also became his highest-grossing work. The year 2012 saw him direct and act in To Rome with Love, while the critically acclaimed Blue Jasmine was released in 2013. His romantic comedy Magic in the Moonlight, set in the 1920s, followed in 2014. That same year Allen was again the subject of controversy when Dylan Farrow reiterated claims that the director had sexually abused her while he was her adoptive father. Allen continued to deny the allegations and no legal action was taken. His forty-fifth film, Irrational Man, came out in 2015, the same year he signed on with Amazon Studios to create his first television series.

While Allen continued to direct and write into the beginning of the 2020s, working on such films as 2016's Café Society, 2017's Wonder Wheel, 2019's A Rainy Day in New York, and 2020's Rifkin's Festival, Dylan Farrow's allegations of sexual abuse lingered. The claims became particularly prominent once more following the release of the HBO docuseries Allen v. Farrow in early 2021, which returns to the accusations with the inclusion of never-before-seen videos of the younger Dylan Farrow describing the abuse she allegedly experienced as well as fresh interviews. The docuseries was highly publicized by the media, and in a responsive statement, in addition to a 2020 interview released shortly after the premiere of Allen v. Farrow in which he addressed the case, Allen once again denied the allegations and criticized the docuseries. In 2023, Allen directed the dark comedy Coup de Chance.

Significance

Allen became one of the most productive filmmakers of his time, turning out almost a film a year throughout his career. Like the great European directors, such as Bergman, Federico Fellini, and François Truffaut, who influenced him, Allen has been one of the most autobiographical of directors, drawing upon all aspects of his life for his films. Never hesitant to present himself as fallible and his view of the world as flawed, Allen is exceptionally self-analytical, clearly trying to work out his demons in his films.

Even if Allen had been satisfied to remain only a performer, he would have made a distinctive mark. Though he has acknowledged the influence of Hope, Allen has a delivery all his own, combining tics, odd pauses, and unusual stresses. Allen is also an outstanding director of actors. The Academy Award–winning performances in his films include Keaton in Annie Hall, Michael Caine and Dianne Wiest in Hannah and Her Sisters, Wiest again in Bullets over Broadway, Mira Sorvino in Mighty Aphrodite, and Penelope Cruz in Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008). Allen won Academy Awards for writing and directing Annie Hall (which also won for best picture) and for writing Hannah and Her Sisters and Midnight in Paris, among many other nominations.

While most of Allen’s films are set in his beloved New York City, many of his twenty-first century films take place in Europe, as with the London-set Match Point. Regardless of location, his characters are always obsessed with love, sex, death, and the disappointments of life.

Bibliography

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Steel, Emily. "Amazon Signs Woody Allen to Write and Direct TV Series." New York Times. New York Times, 13 Jan. 2015. Web. 25 Sept. 2015.

Thorpe, Vanessa. "Woody Allen Denies Dylan Farrow's Bitter Sex Abuse Allegations." Guardian. Guardian News and Media, 8 Feb. 2014. Web. 25 Sept. 2015.

"Woody Allen." Internet Movie Database, 2024, www.imdb.com/name/nm0000095/. Accessed 30 Aug. 2024.