Woody Allen Biography

Born Allen Stewart Konigsberg to a working-class Brooklyn family, he wrote gags for big time entertainers Bob Hope and Sid Caesar before becoming a standup on the 1960s comedy circuit, where he would fumble with his glasses, gulp in faux-terror and deliver devastating one-liners with a boxer's timing.

Allen is the quintessential New Yorker, seemingly full of neuroses and self-doubt. Almost all of his films are set in New York with its diverse characters. The 1979 film Manhattan opens with a breathless Allen voiceover: “He was as tough and romantic as the city he loved. Behind his black-rimmed glasses was the coiled sexual power of a jungle cat ... New York was his town, and it always would be.’’ True at the time for Allen, he has moved his film-making away from New York and into Europe since the turn of the century.

His concise witty one-liners, whether written for popular comedians or for his own act, drove him to write for the stage and screen. Shifting into movies, he pioneered a new brand of romantic comedy, installing himself as an emblematic urban everyman; the nerd who gets the girl (and then usually loses her).

However, Allen's feeble screen persona belies a bloody-minded resilience which has allowed him to last the distance in a cut-throat industry that sees money rather than artistic endeavor as the bottom line.

Stars in his films often agree on the difference between film-Allen and real life-Allen. Melinda and Melinda star Chiwetel Ejiofor said Allen was a mile from his public image. “Having grown up with his films, I was expecting this nervous, neurotic guy who's constantly twitching,’’ he said. “But instead he's a very shrewd and intelligent man who has a twin persona that he puts in his films. “Woody Allen knows exactly what he wants. It's always been his particular strength to push the independent ideal as far as it will go, and he gets away with it because his writing is so extraordinary. He's the living proof that talent will out.’’

A multiple Academy Award winner, Allen has always said any kind of award means nothing to him. He does not screen his motion pictures in competition, deliberately taking them out of consideration for potential awards. Despite much critical acclaim, Allen does face opposition, especially in more recent years, with critics saying he has lost his fizz.

Critics have called his films complacent and over-familiar, with a peevish quality invading his comic worldview. His public image, too, has taken a battering. Over the past decade Allen's films have sometimes played a distant second fiddle to his home life. He has had a protracted legal battle with his former producer and longtime friend Jean Doumanian, a very public and very messy break-up with Mia Farrow, followed by his eventual marriage to their adopted daughter, Soon-Yi Previn. Allen and Soon-Yi have two adopted children of their own.

He has said he never paid attention to the tabloids when he was going through the break-up. “I never give it any thought,’’ he claims. “It never meant anything to me. I just function and the tabloids do their work, and it never had any direct bearing on my life. It didn't make my pictures do better or worse. It didn't make me happy or unhappy. As a newspaper reader you could read about it every day, but there was nothing really happening. If you were in it, it was kind of boring.’’

After his separation from Mia Farrow, they started a long public legal battle over their three children. The case was finally won by Farrow and Allen was denied visitation rights with Dylan O'Sullivan Farrow and could only see his biological son Satchel, now 'Ronan Seamus Farrow', under supervision. Moses Farrow aka Misha chose not to see his father.

Despite the tumult Allen considers himself incredibly lucky. “I have an ideal marriage and great kids. My parents both died peacefully. I was disappointed that I had a falling-out with my former producer because she was a friend, but it's not a brain tumour - that's the worst thing that could happen to either one of us.’’

According to Mia Farrow's biography, `What Falls Away’, Frank Sinatra offered to have Allen's legs broken when he was found to be having an affair with Soon-Yi Previn.

Allen’s early films earned him as much fame behind the scenes as they did on their own merit. He pursued a flighty Diane Keaton in the Oscar-winning Annie Hall, romanced a teenage Mariel Hemingway in Manhattan, and fell foul of the Mob in 1984's Broadway Danny Rose. The melancholic Hannah and Her Sisters was galvanised by his turn as a hypochondriac TV producer, while in 1989's peerless Crimes and Misdemeanours he played a luckless documentary maker who laments that , “the last time I was inside a woman was when I visited the Statue of Liberty’’.

Throughout his 1970s and 80s heyday, Allen's patented blend of neurotic comedy, psychoanalysis and the studied characterisation as seen in European art films made for an exciting cinematic experience. Down the line, however, Allen is looked at more critically as he continues to churn out feature-length films annually.

One critic said Allen was slow to come to terms with his age. He noted that until recently, a succession of young female leads were cast opposite him, “until the audience no longer hoped for a happy ending, but instead wanted to scream: `Leave her alone, granddad!’’’

New York Times writer Elvis Mitchell claimed that the man once hailed as the voice of his generation was now “increasingly out of touch with contemporary America’’. Nick James, the editor of Sight and Sound magazine, said his last few films had been pretty disastrous. “All the things we've come to expect just aren't there any more,’’ he wrote. “The quality of the scripts is not as good. The comic timing is very rusty. My gut feeling is that he no longer has anyone around him who can be critical.

“He's become so venerated and isolated by celebrity that he no longer connects with an audience. Perhaps it's a case of finding some new collaborators - or considering the dreaded word, retirement.’’

Allen is also one of his own fiercest critics. In 2005, he called himself a “mediocre’’ director of “miserable work’’. Speaking at the world premiere of Match Point in London, he said 1992's Husbands and Wives and 1985's The Purple Rose of Cairo were the only two films from his bank of work that could be described as good and dismissed the rest of his work as distinctly average. “People think I'm an intellectual because I wear glasses and they think I'm an artist because my films lose money,’’ he said.

He maintains that he never sees any of his films after they leave the editing room, and that he remains vaguely unhappy with all of them; they never turn out the way he had hoped when he first sketched out his ideas in his bedroom.

What he likes most about filming is allowing actors to improve his scripts. “There is a lot of improvisation,’’ he said. “I make up things all the time, and I encourage the actors to do the same. The first thing I tell the actors is, `Disregard the script - if you want to drop lines, change lines, improvise, lengthen or shorten something just do it and if you're getting anything wrong I'll tell you.’’’

Despite a wealth of successful films set in his native New York, Allen has cast his net to England (Match Point, Scoop) and now Spain (Vicky Cristina Barcelona ) causing concern that he may not deliver these foreign settings with the understanding he delivers in the Big Apple. Allen is an artist whose entire art is drawn from a few blocks of upper Manhattan. He understands the people, their obsessions, hopes and vanities. Although he has been busy overseas, it seems improbable that a man with such a close relationship to New York could abandon it altogether.

Meanwhile, life for Allen appears calmer than any of his characters ever have. “I'd like to keep happy and play with the kids and be with my wife,’’ he said. “I've never known great family life since I was an adult, but now I do and it's meaningful to me. I would like to keep healthy and make a great movie. I would love to be able to do that, but I don't think that's going to happen any more. If I keep working, I think it's possible that I could do a great movie some day by accident.’’