50 Fun Facts About Woody Allen

What was Woody Allen's birth name?

Allan Stewart Konigsberg picked the name Woody Allen as a schoolboy sending one-liners to newspaper columnists.

Woody Allen grew up in Brooklyn, but in which New York City borough was he born?

The Bronx was only his birthplace: he was raised in Brooklyn's Midwood, where the future screen neurotic preferred sports and magic tricks to schoolwork.

Which blockbuster did Annie Hall beat to Best Picture at the 1978 Academy Awards?

Star Wars took six Oscars that night but lost Best Picture to Annie Hall, whose director did not even turn up: Allen declined to attend the ceremony and stayed in New York.

As of 2025, Allen holds the Oscar nominations record in which category?

Original screenplay: he has 16 nominations and three wins in the category, yet he stayed away from the ceremony even on the nights Annie Hall and Midnight in Paris won him the prize.

Which psychiatric term was Allen's working title for Annie Hall?

Anhedonia, the inability to feel pleasure, was the title Allen wanted; his co-writer countered with jokes such as It Had to Be Jew and A Rollercoaster Named Desire.

What is the name of Allen's character in Annie Hall, a comic picking over a failed relationship?

Alvy Singer talks straight to camera about the break-up; Allen denied the film was autobiography, though Diane Keaton's real surname is Hall and Annie was her nickname.

Which thinker steps out from behind a poster in Annie Hall to rebuke a man in a cinema queue?

Marshall McLuhan was only the third choice for the cameo, after Federico Fellini and Luis Buñuel; he steps out to tell the bore in the queue, 'You know nothing of my work.'

Which cinematographer shot Annie Hall, the first of his eight films with Allen?

Gordon Willis was nicknamed 'the Prince of Darkness' for the shadows of The Godfather, yet neither that film nor Annie Hall, both Best Picture winners, brought him even an Oscar nomination.

Which composer's music scores Allen's 1979 film Manhattan, from its opening skyline montage onward?

George Gershwin is named in the opening voice-over, which says New York 'pulsated to the great tunes of George Gershwin' as Rhapsody in Blue plays.

Which actress plays Tracy, the 17-year-old dating Allen's twice-divorced character in Manhattan?

Mariel Hemingway earned an Oscar nomination as Tracy, whom Isaac drops for a woman nearer his age and then, in the final scene, runs across the city to win back.

In which 1983 mockumentary does Allen play a man who takes on the traits of those around him?

Zelig drops Allen's 'human chameleon' into real 1920s newsreel footage, a blend of old and new film achieved about a decade before Forrest Gump did the same with computers.

Who plays the Depression-era moviegoer in The Purple Rose of Cairo whose life Jeff Daniels's character walks into?

Mia Farrow's Cecilia is watching the film yet again when its explorer hero notices her and steps down from the screen, leaving the rest of the cast stranded and refusing to go on without him.

Which two actors won Supporting Oscars for Allen's 1986 Thanksgiving-framed family drama?

Michael Caine and Dianne Wiest both won, but Caine missed the ceremony because he was away in the Bahamas filming Jaws: The Revenge.

What is the profession of Judah Rosenthal, Martin Landau's character in Crimes and Misdemeanors?

Ophthalmologist Judah has his mistress killed and walks away untroubled, while the rabbi he treats, the one man who urged him to come clean, ends the film blind.

In which city is Allen's 2005 thriller Match Point set?

London, where Allen found the backing that American studios would not give a small film, suited him so well that he stayed on to make his next two pictures in England too.

Who won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for Vicky Cristina Barcelona?

Penélope Cruz won as the combustible ex-wife of Javier Bardem's painter, and off screen the story ran the other way: the two actors married in 2010.

Which actor plays Gil Pender, the screenwriter transported to the 1920s each night in Midnight in Paris?

Owen Wilson changed the part: Allen had written Gil as an East Coast intellectual, then rethought him as a Californian once Wilson's name came up in casting.

Which 1986 film was Allen's biggest North American hit until Midnight in Paris passed it?

Hannah and Her Sisters took $40.1 million in 1986 and stayed his top earner for 25 years, though only on paper: the comparison takes no account of ticket-price inflation.

Who won the Best Actress Oscar for playing a fallen Manhattan socialite in Blue Jasmine (2013)?

Cate Blanchett's ruined socialite, landing on her sister's doorstep, reminded many of Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire, a role Blanchett had already played on stage.

In Sleeper, Allen's defrosted hero hides from the police by posing as what?

A robot is what Miles pretends to be, white-faced and stiff, until he is delivered as a butler to a socialite who decides her new servant's head needs replacing.

In Bananas (1971), Allen plays Fielding Mellish, a bumbling New Yorker caught up in what?

A Latin American revolution in the invented republic of San Marcos sweeps him up after he tries to impress an activist, and the rebels end by making him their president.

Which 1966 film did Allen create by redubbing a Japanese spy thriller with new comic dialogue?

What's Up, Tiger Lily? keeps the pictures of a Japanese James Bond imitation and swaps the plot: the agents are now hunting the recipe for the world's best egg salad.

In Take the Money and Run (1969), Allen plays which incompetent thief?

Virgil Starkwell's bank job falls apart at the counter, where the tellers cannot read his hold-up note and argue over whether he is pointing a 'gun' or a 'gub' at them.

Which 1975 Allen film starring Diane Keaton spoofs Russian literature in the Napoleonic era?

Love and Death parodies Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, with Allen and Keaton as Russians who break off their mock-philosophical debates to plot the assassination of Napoleon.

For which TV star did the young Allen write alongside Mel Brooks and Larry Gelbart?

Sid Caesar took Allen onto his writing staff in 1958, a team that became a comedy nursery: Gelbart, one of his colleagues there, went on to make the television version of M*A*S*H.

In which New York neighbourhood's clubs did Allen turn himself from joke writer into stand-up comedian?

Greenwich Village clubs were where the television gag writer began telling his own jokes in 1960, a sideline that soon brought talk-show bookings and three comedy albums.

Which comedian did Allen credit with opening up 'vistas' for comics like him?

Mort Sahl's conversational act, with a newspaper as its only prop, gave Allen, a joke writer who said he had never had the nerve, the push to try stand-up himself.

Which animal does Allen take to a costume party in a routine from his 1960s stand-up act?

A moose he believes he has shot comes round while strapped to his car, so he takes it along to a friends' costume party, where it mingles with the guests.

What was Allen's first Broadway hit, a 1966 farce set in an American embassy behind the Iron Curtain?

Don't Drink the Water was filmed in 1969 with Jackie Gleason, and a quarter of a century later Allen directed a television version and took the lead himself.

In which 1969 Broadway show did Diane Keaton first act opposite Allen, earning a Tony nomination?

Play It Again, Sam has Allen as a jilted film critic taking romantic advice from the ghost of Humphrey Bogart; Keaton played the same part again in the 1972 film.

Which instrument has Woody Allen played for decades with his New Orleans Jazz Band?

Clarinet came before Hollywood: on the night Annie Hall won Best Picture in 1978, Allen was in a Manhattan pub playing his usual Monday set with his band.

Which 1997 documentary by Barbara Kopple follows Allen's band on a European tour?

Wild Man Blues ends back home at his parents' table, where his father inspects the engraving on the tour trophies and his mother wonders if he should have been a pharmacist.

Allen and his partner of 1980 to 1992 lived on opposite sides of which landmark?

Central Park lay between their apartments for all twelve years: the couple never married or moved in together, even as she starred in one of his films after another.

Which Bananas co-star was once Allen's wife?

Louise Lasser was married to Allen from 1966 to 1970; in Bananas she plays the activist his character is desperate to impress, and she later found television fame in Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman.

Allen and Soon-Yi Previn named their first daughter after which New Orleans jazz great, his musical idol?

Sidney Bechet gave his name to Bechet Dumaine Allen, and the couple kept the theme going: their second adopted daughter, Manzie, is named for the jazz drummer Manzie Johnson.

In which Italian city did Allen marry Soon-Yi Previn in December 1997?

Venice's mayor, a philosopher by trade, married them himself in the city's civil wedding hall, in a private ceremony with no advance notice.

What is the title of Allen's 2020 memoir?

Apropos of Nothing was dropped by its first publisher after staff walked out in protest, then appeared within weeks from a smaller house instead.

What was Allen's 2016 Amazon series, which he predicted would be 'a cosmic embarrassment', called?

Crisis in Six Scenes was, he told reporters while still writing it, 'a catastrophic mistake'; he went on to write, direct and star in all of it regardless.

What was new about Allen's 50th feature, a thriller released in 2023?

It is his first in French: Allen moved to Paris to shoot Coup de Chance, a thriller he likened to Match Point and suggested at the time might be his last film.

Which Allen film became a 2014 stage musical, earning him a Tony nomination for Best Book?

Bullets Over Broadway, in which a mob henchman minding the gangster's girlfriend turns out to write better than the playwright, reached the stage without a new score: its songs are all existing standards.

Which 1980 Allen film, shot in black and white, borrows its style from Fellini's 8½?

Stardust Memories shows a comedy director who has come to resent his fans at a weekend retrospective of his films; some critics bristled, but Allen counts it among his best work.

Which Bergman film did Allen loosely rework as his 1982 comedy about three couples in the country?

Smiles of a Summer Night, Bergman's comedy of couples swapping partners, had already been reworked once, as Stephen Sondheim's 1973 Broadway musical A Little Night Music.

In The Front (1976), Allen's cashier puts his name on TV scripts because their real writers are what?

Blacklisted in real life too: the film's director, its writer and co-star Zero Mostel had all been barred from work in the 1950s, and the end credits give the year each was listed.

What first brought Allen to the Oscars in person, in 2002?

A New York tribute, staged six months after the September 11 attacks, drew him out: he introduced a montage of films made in the city and was given a standing ovation.

Which 1995 Allen comedy won Mira Sorvino the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress?

Mighty Aphrodite is narrated by a Greek chorus in a ruined Sicilian theatre, who fret over a New York sportswriter's hunt for his adopted son's birth mother.

In which 1998 animated film does Allen voice a neurotic worker who starts out on a psychiatrist's couch?

Antz opens with Allen's worker Z on the couch asking 'what about my needs?'; DreamWorks got it into cinemas a month before Pixar's rival insect film, after a public feud between the studios.

The Purple Rose of Cairo reverses which Buster Keaton film, where a projectionist dreams himself into a movie?

Sherlock Junior has Keaton's projectionist doze off and step into the film on his own screen; Allen sent a screen hero the other way, out into the audience.

Which comedian stars in Whatever Works (2009), in a role Allen had written in the 1970s for Zero Mostel?

Larry David inherited a script that had sat unused for some thirty years after Mostel's death in 1977; Allen dusted it off and updated it only slightly.

Shadows and Fog, Allen's black-and-white homage to German expressionism, is scored with which Weimar-era theatre composer's music?

Kurt Weill's tunes play as a timid clerk is hauled out of bed to join a vigilante hunt for a killer, a story Allen expanded from his own one-act play Death.

Allen's Rifkin's Festival (2020) is set at, and had its premiere at, which European film festival?

San Sebastián is where the whole story unfolds, as a film critic trails his press-agent wife around the festival, so the comedy opened the very event it depicts.