About
Heywood "Woody" Allen (born Allan Stewart Konigsberg; December 1, 1935) is an American director, writer, actor, and comedian whose career spans more than six decades. He began his career as a comedy writer in the 1950s, writing jokes and scripts for television and publishing several books of short humor pieces. In the early 1960s, Allen began performing as a stand-up comedian, emphasizing monologues rather than traditional jokes. As a comedian, he developed the persona of an insecure, intellectual, fretful nebbish, which he maintains is quite different from his real-life personality. In 2004, Comedy Central ranked Allen fourth on a list of the 100 greatest stand-up comedians, while a UK survey ranked Allen as the third-greatest comedian.
By the mid-1960s, Allen was writing and directing films, first specializing in slapstick comedies before moving into dramatic material influenced by European art cinema during the 1970s, and alternating between comedies and dramas to the present. He is often identified as part of the New Hollywood wave of filmmakers of the mid-1960s to late 1970s. Allen often stars in his films, typically in the persona he developed as a standup. Some of the best-known of his over 50 films are Annie Hall (1977), Manhattan (1979), Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), and Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989). In 2007 he said Stardust Memories (1980), The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985), and Match Point (2005) were his best films. Critic Roger Ebert described Allen as "a treasure of the cinema".
Allen has received many accolades and honors throughout his career. He has won four Academy Awards: three for Best Original Screenplay and one for Best Director. He also garnered nine British Academy Film Awards. His screenplay for Annie Hall was named the funniest screenplay by the Writers Guild of America in its list of the "101 Funniest Screenplays". In 2011, PBS televised the film biography Woody Allen: A Documentary on the American Masters TV series.
In 1992 Dylan Farrow accused Allen of molesting her, an accusation he has repeatedly denied. The accusation gained new life with the rise of the Me Too movement. In 2019 Amazon canceled the release of his film A Rainy Day in New York, which was filmed in 2017. Allen is suing Amazon for breach of contract for $68 million. As of February 2019, he is shooting a film in Spain.
Allen was born Allan Stewart Konigsberg in the Brooklyn borough of New York City. He and his sister, Letty (b. 1943), were raised in Midwood, Brooklyn. He is the son of Nettie (née Cherry; November 8, 1906 – January 27, 2002), a bookkeeper at her family's delicatessen, and Martin Konigsberg (December 25, 1900 – January 8, 2001), a jewelry engraver and waiter. His family was Jewish, and his grandparents immigrated to the US from Russia and Austria and spoke Yiddish, Hebrew, and German. Both of Allen's parents were born and raised on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.
His childhood was not particularly happy; his parents did not get along, and he had a rocky relationship with his stern, temperamental mother. Allen spoke German quite a bit in his early years. He would later joke that when he was young he was often sent to inter-faith summer camps. While attending Hebrew school for eight years, he went to Public School 99 (now the Isaac Asimov School for Science and Literature) and to Midwood High School, where he graduated in 1953. Unlike his comic persona, he was more interested in baseball than school and his strong arms ensured he was first to be picked for a team. He impressed students with his extraordinary talent with cards and magic tricks.
For pay, he wrote jokes (or "gags") for agent David O. Alber, who sold them to newspaper columnists. At the age of 17, he legally changed his name to Heywood Allen and later began to call himself Woody Allen. According to Allen, his first published joke read: "Woody Allen says he ate at a restaurant that had O.P.S. prices—over people's salaries."He was earning more than both his parents combined. After high school, he attended New York University, studying communication and film in 1953, before dropping out after failing the course "Motion Picture Production". He studied film at City College of New York in 1954 but left before the end of the first semester. He taught himself rather than studying in the classroom. He taught at The New School and studied with writing teacher Lajos Egri.