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Heywood Allen (born Allan Stewart Konigsberg; November 30, 1935) [a] is an American filmmaker, actor, and comedian whose career spans more than six decades. Allen has received many accolades, including the most nominations (16) for the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay.
- Allan Stewart Konigsberg, November 30, 1935 (age 87), New York City, U.S.
- City College of New York (dropped out)
- 1956–present
- Letty Aronson (sister)
IMDb provides an extensive overview of Woody Allen's life and career as a writer, director, actor and comedian. Browse his credits, photos, videos, trivia, awards and more on the world's most popular and authoritative source for movie, TV and celebrity content.
- January 1, 1
- 1.65 m
- Bronx, New York City, New York, USA
Woody Allen filmography. Allen in the early 1970s. Woody Allen has acted in, directed, and written many films starting in the 1960s. His first film was the 1965 comedy What's New Pussycat?, which featured him as both writer and performer.
Learn about the life and career of Woody Allen, a prolific and influential filmmaker, writer and comedian. Find out his birth name, height, family, awards, trivia, quotes and more on IMDb.
- November 30, 1935
- Overview
- Youth and early work
- The 1970s
Woody Allen (born November 30, 1935, Bronx, New York, U.S.) is an American motion-picture director, screenwriter, actor, comedian, playwright, and author who is best known for his bittersweet comic films containing elements of parody, slapstick, and the absurd but who also made weighty dramas, often with dark themes and bleak landscapes reminiscent of the work of Swedish director Ingmar Bergman—who, perhaps more than any other filmmaker, influenced Allen’s work. Allen was also known as a sympathetic director for women, writing strong and well-defined characters for them. By the late 1970s he was widely regarded as one of the world’s most-accomplished filmmakers, but the unevenness of later films and allegations of sexual abuse tarnished his reputation.
(Read Martin Scorsese’s Britannica essay on film preservation.)
According to official documents, Allen Konigsberg was born on December 1, 1935. However, he later wrote in his autobiography, Apropos of Nothing (2020), that his actual birth date was November 30. He grew up in Brooklyn in a family steeped in Jewish culture. Konigsberg was especially close to his younger sister, who would later work with him as a producer. As a boy, he was enamoured of sports, magic, motion pictures, and jazz (taking up the clarinet as a teenager, though his musical idol was saxophonist Sidney Bechet). While still in high school, using the name Woody Allen, he began submitting quips to newspaper columnists—most notably to the nationally syndicated Earl Wilson. Before long, as Woody Allen, he was being paid to write jokes for entertainers. Stints by Allen as a student at New York University (as a film major) and the City College of New York were ended abruptly by poor grades and erratic attendance. In 1956 Allen began writing for television, and in 1958 he joined Sid Caesar’s writing staff alongside Larry Gelbart (later the writer-producer of TV’s M*A*S*H*) and Mel Brooks. In 1960 Allen moved to the Garry Moore Show. At this time he also began performing stand-up comedy at clubs in Greenwich Village, which led to guest appearances on television and to several comedy albums.
While performing stand-up in a nightclub in 1964, Allen impressed actress Shirley MacLaine and producer Charles K. Feldman, who gave him a chance to write the screenplay for the film What’s New, Pussycat? (1965), in which he also appeared. Allen made his first film, What’s Up, Tiger Lily? (1966), by redubbing a James Bond-like Japanese action film, International Secret Police: Key of Keys (1965), and shifting its focus to the pursuit of a top-secret recipe for egg salad. A year later Allen played Bond’s nephew in Casino Royale. In the meantime, he wrote a play, Don’t Drink the Water, which won acclaim on Broadway in 1966. That year also marked Allen’s first contribution to The New Yorker. Writing initially in the style of S.J. Perelman, Allen would go on to contribute dozens of sophisticated humour pieces to the magazine over several decades; these pieces were collected in books such as Without Feathers (1975) and Getting Even (1978).
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Before undertaking another feature film, Allen starred on Broadway from 1969 to 1970 in another play that he had written, the romantic comedy Play It Again, Sam. In the 1972 Herbert Ross-directed film adaptation of the play, Allen reprised his role as a shy film critic who seeks romantic advice from an apparition of Humphrey Bogart. Bananas (1971), the first of Allen’s directorial efforts for United Artists, starred him as a hapless, neurotic Manhattanite who is drawn into a revolution in a fictional Central American country. Though somewhat undisciplined, Bananas offered snatches of absurdist humour that rank among Allen’s funniest film moments.
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In Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex* (*but Were Afraid to Ask) (1972), Allen satirized David Reuben’s popular sex manual with mixed results. Sleeper (1973), a far more cohesive satire, featured Allen in the role of a neurotic health-food mogul who goes into the hospital for a simple operation and awakens 200 years later to learn that doctors had frozen him and that he is now a stranger in an even stranger land. Sex is forbidden—a notion inimical to any Allen protagonist—so he joins the rebel underground, whose leader is played by Diane Keaton (Allen’s costar in Play It Again, Sam). Love and Death (1975), a parody of Leo Tolstoy’s fiction, Sergey Eisenstein’s filmmaking, and a clutch of other landmarks of Russian culture, was less universally applauded.
After delivering an excellent “straight” performance as the protagonist in The Front (1976), Martin Ritt’s fine drama about Hollywood blacklisting, Allen made Annie Hall (1977), a breakthrough work that dramatically elevated his status as a filmmaker. An elliptical account of the rise and fall of a romance between the quirky title character (played by Keaton) and a comedy writer (Allen), it was Allen’s first attempt to blend genuine sentiment with his patented theatre-of-the-ridiculous. Although Allen denied its origins in autobiography, the poignant love story almost certainly mirrored some aspects of the real-life relationship that had transpired between Keaton and Allen. The film also marked the emergence of the distinctive on-screen persona that many came to believe was merely an extension of the offscreen Allen: a neurotic, erudite, wisecracking, moralistic, phobia-ridden pessimist who is obsessed with his mortality but finds solace for his existential despair in art and love and who is at base a mensch. Annie Hall won Academy Awards for best picture, best actress (Keaton), best director, and best screenplay (Allen and collaborator Marshall Brickman). Allen, however, chose not to attend the Academy Award ceremony and instead played clarinet at Michael’s Pub in Manhattan, as he usually did on Monday nights.
Allen’s next film, Interiors (1978), was a carefully crafted homage to the weighty psychodramas of Ingmar Bergman. Abjuring humour, this tale of a dysfunctional family (starring Geraldine Page, Maureen Stapleton, E.G. Marshall, Mary Beth Hurt, and Keaton) received a mixed reaction from critics, some of whom saw it as decidedly pretentious. Despite the film’s poor showing at the box office, Allen received Academy Award nominations for best director and best original screenplay.
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Apr 2, 2014 · Learn about the life and career of Woody Allen, an American film director, screenwriter, actor and author who is known for his comedies and dramas. Find out about his personal life, his controversies, his awards and his filmography.
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Feb 22, 2021 · March 18, 1993. After a seven-month inquiry by a team of child-abuse investigators at Yale-New Haven Hospital, Mr. Allen’s lawyers say he has been cleared of molesting Dylan Farrow. Ms. Farrow...
