On November 30, 1935, Allan Stewart Konigsberg was born in New York City.
Despite his family’s Brooklyn residence, Mount Eden Hospital in the Bronx was the birthplace. He is a Jew.
Allen’s parents were Martin Konigsberg (1900-2001), a jewelry engraver and waiter, and Nettie (née Cherry; 1906-2002), a bookkeeper at her family’s delicatessen. His grandfather arrived in the United States as an immigrant from Austria and Panevys, a city in Lithuania. They could speak Yiddish, German, and Hebrew.
He was up in Brooklyn’s Midwood neighborhood with his younger sister, film producer Letty. The Lower East Side of Manhattan is where both of their parents were born and reared.
He studied communication and film at New York University before dropping out after failing a film course. He later taught at The New School and studied with Lajos Egri.
Woody Allen top movies and TV shows
He started out as a television writer in the 1950s, mostly for Your Show of Shows (1950–1954), when he collaborated with Mel Brooks, Carl Reiner, Larry Gelbart, and Neil Simon. In addition, he authored a number of books with short tales and contributed humorous essays to The New Yorker.
He shared the stage in Greenwich Village with Lenny Bruce, Elaine May, Mike Nichols, and Joan Rivers during the beginning of the 1960s. There, he honed his monologue technique (instead of using traditional jokes) and the persona of an intelligent, anxious, nervous nebbish.
Allen began writing and directing movies in the middle of the 1960s, specializing first in slapstick comedies like Take the Money and Run (1969), Bananas (1971), Sleeper (1973), and Love and Death (1975), before transitioning to dramatic work influenced by European art cinema in the late 1970s with Interiors (1978), Manhattan (1979), and Stardust Memories (1980), and alternating between comedies and dramas to the present.
Allen is frequently referred to as a member of the New Hollywood generation of filmmakers who worked during the mid-1960s and late 1970s, including Sidney Lumet, Martin Scorsese, and Robert Altman.
He frequently plays the lead role in his movies, usually taking on the persona he created while doing standup. Allen and Diane Keaton starred in the romantic comedy Annie Hall (1977), which won four Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, and Best Actress for Keaton.
With movies like Zelig (1983), Broadway Danny Rose (1984), The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985), Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), Radio Days (1987), and Crimes and Misdemeanors, critics have dubbed his work from the 1980s as his most matured period (1989).
Allen’s movies from the twenty-first century, such as Match Point (2005), Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008), Midnight in Paris (2011), and To Rome with Love (2012), were frequently filmed in Europe before they were brought back to the United States for Blue Jasmine (2013), Cafe Society (2016), and A Rainy Day in New York (2017). (2018).
Woody Allen awards and nominations
With 16 nominations for the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay, Allen has garnered the greatest praise and distinctions. His four Academy Awards include three for best original screenplay and one for best director.
Nine British Academy Film Awards were also won by him. In 1997, the British Academy of Film and Television Arts gave Allen the BAFTA Fellowship. In 2014, he was nominated for a Tony Award for Best Book of a Musical for Bullets over Broadway and got the Cecil B. DeMille Award for Lifetime Achievement at the Golden Globes.
His script for Annie Hall came in first place on the Writers Guild of America’s list of the “101 Funniest Screenplays” in 2015. In 2011 PBS aired Woody Allen: A Documentary as part of its American Masters series.
