Allen, Woody

Related Category: Film and Television: Biographies

(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).

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.