Compile 90 years old an icon of world cinema, who between his passion for jazz and black and white, poised between New York and Europe, has made not only cinephiles laugh and cry for 60 years. Woody Allenborn Allen Stewart Konigsberg, director, actor, screenwriter, but also composer, born in Flatbush, a neighborhood of Brooklyn, on November 30, 1935, to a Jewish family of Hungarian origin, has over fifty films, won three Oscars and obtained eighteen nominations, telling with irony and lightness the fragility, love, misery and hidden recesses of the human soul.
A life also crossed by scandalslike the one that saw him in conflict with his ex-partner Mia Farrow due to allegations of molestation by his daughter Dylanalways denied by him and not proven in court. But above all by his love for his city, New York, at the center of almost all his inspiration, and for cinema. Allen, who also worked in radio and TV, made his film debut as an actor in 1965 with ‘What’s new Pussicat?’, based on his own story, and as a director in 1969 with ‘Take the Money and Run’.
But it is ‘Annie & Me’, the film which in 1978 gave him four Oscars (including best director and best screenplay), a comedy about the failure of a love and the impossibility of stopping analyzing it, starring Diane Keaton, his muse and life partner, who consecrated him as the director of an entire generation of spectators; ‘Manhattan’, the following year, an ode to his city that lives between jazz and neon lights, in which insecure writers and indecipherable women move, confirms the affection of audiences all over the world for Allen.
With an average of almost one title a year and the ability to move with ease from comedy to drama, the director has managed to establish himself as one of the most authoritative voices of the seventh art. It is impossible to list all his titles, from ‘Interiors’, to ‘Stardust Memories’, ‘Zelig’, ‘The Purple Rose of Cairo’, ‘Hannah and Her Sisters’, up to the more recent ‘Crimes and Misdemeanors’, ‘Shadows and Fog’, ‘Husbands and Wives’, ‘Bullets Over Broadway’, ‘The Goddess of Love’, ‘Everyone Says I love you’, ‘Agreements and Disagreements’, ‘Match Point’, ‘Dreams and Crimes’, ‘Blu Jasmine’, ‘Vicky Cristina Barcelona’, ‘Midnight in Paris’ and ‘To Rome with Love’. Woody Allen has written a lot, including autobiography, scattered thoughts, interviews and novels, up to the recent ‘What’s up with Baum?’.
But he also played the clarinet with passion. And it seems certain that he will soon be back behind the camera to shoot in Spain. The director is very attached to Italy, so much so that he married Soon-yi Previn in Venice in 1997.