Allen, Woody, 1935–, American actor, writer, and director, one of contemporary America's leading filmmakers, b. Brooklyn, N.Y., as Allen Stewart Konigsberg. 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.
A prolific filmmaker, he has made more than 40 motion
pictures. Among his
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); and the bittersweet domestic
drama Husbands and Wives (1992). Several subsequent films failed to achieve
the critical and popular plaudits earned by many earlier films, but Match
Point (2005), a tale of wealth, lust, crime, and luck set in London, did much to
revive his flagging reputation. Allen turned to Catalonia, Spain, for his sensual,
melancholy-tinged comedy Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008), and to Paris for
his atmospheric Midnight in Paris (2011; Academy Award, best original
screenplay). Blue Jasmine (2013), the story of a rich matron fallen on hard
times, echoes Tennessee Williams's Streetcar Named
Desire, and Magic in the Moonlight (2014) replays the debate
between rationalism and superstition in a period romantic comedy. Subsequent films, which have
featured Allen's usual themes, have generally fallen short of his earlier work. Allen also has
written humorous prose pieces and plays. In 1992, in a bitter public dispute, Allen left Mia
Farrow for her adopted daughter, and then sued the actress for custody of their children and
lost (1993). Since the 1990s, Allen has been embroiled in charges by Farrow's adopted
daughter, Dylan, of sexual abuse when she was seven years old, which he has denied. His
biological son with Farrow, Ronan Farrow, is an accomplished journalist who sides with Dylan
in her claims that Allen abused her.
See his The Insanity Defense: The Complete Prose (2007); Woody Allen on
Woody Allen (1995) and E. Lax, Conversations with Woody Allen
(2007); his memoir, Apropos of
Nothing (2020); 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),
D. Brode (1997), and E. Lax (2017); documentary dir. by B. Kopple (1998); television
documentary Allen v. Farrow, dir. by K. Dick and A. Ziering (2021).
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