WoodyAllen (born 1935) has been one of America's most prominent film makers, with a series of very Personal films about the subjects that have always obsessed him: sex, death and the meaning of life.

“I sat down to do something popular, I don't think I could" Woody Allen told interviewer Stephen Farber in 1985. "I'm not making films because I want to be in the movie business. I'm making them because I want to say something.” When AIIen was one of America's most popular stand-up comedians, his fans might have mocked those words, coming from a man whose first role models were Bob Hope and Groucho Marx.

Allen's own films have been made on modest budgets in New York City , where he lives, with no concessions to studio taste of control. Despite the growing seriousness of his work, audience have never lost sight of Allen the performer and the character he created for himself in his days as a comedian : a nerdy neurotic whose only defense against a hostile universe is his sense of the absurd, which he fearlessly directs at any and all targets, beginning with himself. A very private man, Allen has reluctantly become a public figure, but through all the changes and controversies. “The Woodman” has remained a symbol of uncompromising integrity to his loyal fans. On that subject, he told Farber, “I never hold them cheaply… I never write down to them… I always assume that they’re at least as smart as I am, if not smarter, and… I try to do films that they will respect.”

Woody Allen was born Allen Konigsberg on December 1, 1935, in the Bronx and grew up in Brooklyn. He changed his name to Woody Allen when at age 17 he began submitting jokes to a newspaper column, eventually attracting the attention of a publicist who hired him to write gags for his clients. After graduation, Allen enrolled in New York University as a motion picture major and then in night school at City College, but dropped out of both to pursue his career as a comedy writer. Years later he he told his biographer Eric Lax that when a dean recommended he “seek psychiatric help” if he ever wanted to get a job, he replied that he was already working in show business. “Well, if you’re around other crazy people”, the dean conceded, “maybe you won’t stand out”.

Fortunately, Allen had a remarkable gift for his chosen profession. In a New Yorker article, Adam Gopnik recalled, “Woody was famous among his contemporaries for possessing a pure and almost abstract gift for one-liners… that could be applied to any situation, or passed on to any comic, almost impersonally.” Before he turned 20 Allen had sold 20,000 gags to the New York tabloids, married his childhood sweetheart Harlene Rosen and landed a job in the writer’s development program at NBC. By the time he turned 23 he was writing for the network’s biggest comedy star, Sid Caesar, and had signed with talent managers Jack Rollins and Charles Joffe, who would later produce his films. He had also hired a tutor from Columbia University to teach him literature and philosophy at home.

At the urging of his new managers, Allen began performing his own material in a small New York nightclub in 1960. Hoping his craft in painful encounters with the audience night after night, six nights a week, he struck a gold mine of comedy material when he and Rosen divorced in 1962. (His jokes about his ex wife eventually led to a lawsuit from Rosen that was settled out of court.) By this time Allen was beginning to appear on network television and was a hit at Greenwich Village's legendary coffee house, The Bitter End.

Unlike other comics of the time, who favored political hornor, Allen made jokes about his own comic persona, the little guy tormented by big philosophical issues and his unfailing hard Iuck with women, This fact was appreciated by a New York Times reviewer, who called him "the freshest comic to emerge in many months."

[please download PdF file for further story]