Stage and film actor Tony Roberts, who often starred in Woody Allen movies, dies at 85
NEW YORK — Tony Roberts, a versatile, Tony Award-nominated theater performer at home in both plays and musicals and who appeared in several Woody Allen movies — often as Allen's best friend — has died. He was 85.
Roberts' death was announced to The New York Times by his daughter, Nicole Burley.
Roberts had a genial stage personality perfect for musical comedy and he originated roles in such diverse Broadway musicals as 'How Now, Dow Jones' (1967); 'Sugar' (1972), an adaptation of the movie 'Some Like It Hot,' and 'Victor/Victoria' (1995), in which he co-starred with Julie Andrews when she returned to Broadway in the stage version of her popular film. He also was in the campy, roller-disco 'Xanadu' in 2007 and 'The Royal Family' in 2009.
'I've never been particularly lucky at card games. I've never hit a jackpot. But I have been extremely lucky in life,' he write in his memoir, 'Do You Know Me?' 'Unlike many of my pals, who didn't know what they wanted to become when they grew up, I knew I wanted to be an actor before I got to high school.'
Roberts also appeared on Broadway in the 1966 Woody Allen comedy 'Don't Drink the Water,' repeating his role in the film version, and in Allen's 'Play It Again, Sam' (1969), for which he also made the movie.
Other Allen films in which Roberts appeared were 'Annie Hall' (1977), 'Stardust Memories' (1980), 'A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy' (1982), 'Hannah and Her Sisters' (1986) and 'Radio Days' (1987).
'Roberts' confident onscreen presence — not to mention his tall frame, broad shoulders and brown curly mane — was the perfect foil for Allen's various neurotic characters, making them more funny and enjoyable to watch,' The Jewish Daily Forward wrote in 2016.
In Eric Lax's book 'Woody Allen: A Biography,' Roberts recalled a complicated scene in 'A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy' that Allen shot over and over — even after the film had been edited — to get his intended effect.
'When you go back to see (Allen's work) two, three, four times, you begin to see the amazing amount of art in it, that nothing is accidental,' Roberts said.
Among his other movies were 'Serpico' (1973) and 'The Taking of Pelham One Two Three' (1974).
He was nominated twice for a Tony Award — for 'How Now, Dow Jones' and 'Play It Again, Sam,' when he was billed as Anthony Roberts.
One of Roberts' biggest Broadway successes was Charles Busch's hit comedy 'The Tale of the Allergist's Wife' (2000), in which he played the title character's husband.
Roberts, who made his Broadway debut in 1962 in the short-lived 'Something About a Soldier,' also was a replacement in some of its longest-running hits including 'Barefoot in the Park,' 'Promises, 'Promises,' 'They're Playing Our Song,' 'Jerome Robbins' Broadway,' 'The Sisters Rosensweig' and the 1998 Roundabout Theatre Company revival of 'Cabaret.'
'I was lucky enough to get in on the last years of the Golden Age of Broadway. In that era there was a lot more going on that seemed to have high quality about it and great conviction,' he told Broadway World in 2015.
In London, he starred with Betty Buckley in the West End production of 'Promises, Promises,' playing the Jack Lemmon role in this stage version of 'The Apartment.'
Roberts' television credits include the short-lived series 'The Four Seasons' (1984) and 'The Lucie Arnaz Show' (1985) as well as guest spots on such well-known shows as 'Murder, She Wrote' and 'Law & Order.'
Roberts was born in New York on Oct. 22, 1939, the son of radio and television announced Ken Roberts.
'I was raised in the middle of a lot of actor talk,' he told the AP in 1985. 'My cousin was Everett Sloane, who was a very fine actor. My father's friends were mostly actors. I'm sure that in some way I needed to prove myself in their eyes.'
He attended the High School of Music and Art in New York and graduated from Northwestern University in Illinois.
His marriage to Jennifer Lyons ended in divorce. He is survived by his daughter, the actor Nicole Burley.
He first met Allen backstage when he was starring in 'Barefoot in the Park,' having replaced Robert Redford. Roberts had unsuccessfully auditioned four times for Allen's first Broadway play, 'Don't Drink the Water.' Seeing Roberts perform in 'Barefoot in the Park' convinced Allen that Roberts was worth casting. According to his memoir, Allen told him, 'You were great. How come you're such a lousy auditioner?'
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
The Guardian
an hour ago
- The Guardian
Everyone's a winner: how awards shows became popular again
The annual Tony awards, honoring excellence in American theatre, have never exactly been a TV ratings powerhouse compared to the Oscars or Grammys. Yet the most recent ceremony experienced a surprise surge in viewership, with broadcast viewership up 44% compared to the 2024 installment. It was the largest audience since the last pre-pandemic edition in 2019. That seems to sync up with the record-setting season that the awards were celebrating, where Broadway productions featured a number of movie stars drawing huge crowds (and ticket prices). Yet apart from George Clooney and a few other familiar faces, it wasn't a particularly starry Tonys; Denzel Washington, Jake Gyllenhaal and Kieran Culkin weren't nominated, and there wasn't a single crossover mass-culture powerhouse like Hamilton or The Producers (whose winning telecasts are still the highest-rated of the 21st century). Moreover, Broadway isn't alone; the Oscars experienced ratings growth (part of a four-year upward trend), and the left-for-dead Golden Globes have stabilized. This trend goes back nearly a year, to last fall, when MTV's more specialized Video Music Awards saw an uptick and Emmy viewership jumped up 50% to a three-year high. Awards shows, so often derided as bloated, self-congratulatory ratings ploys, have somehow survived the streaming apocalypse to become broadcast TV's last stand. (Apart from real sports, of course.) In some ways, it makes sense. Very few scripted shows still command watch-it-live urgency, not least because it's not always clear when or if they air live in the first place. Awards shows, however, only really need the date; most of them run for the full prime-time block, and in some cases on multiple channels. (The VMAs are basically shown on the entire Paramount family of channels, as if to scoop up as many errant unconverted cable-watchers as possible.) It seems related to how Saturday Night Live has become one of the highest-rated shows on network TV simply by not bleeding quite as many viewers as its primetime brethren: everyone knows when and where it's on and what its deal is – yet it also doesn't require full and sustained attention to enjoy. Similarly, awards shows sprawl out like a lazy couch stretch, while also breaking into easy-to-follow segments. And despite the ubiquity of shareable online highlights – you probably could have watched three-quarters of the Tonys in 47-second clips on social media – those bits and bobs are really more fun if you're actually watching along in real time, rather than piecing together the timeline like an awards detective. Remember various apps trying to sync up Watch Parties for isolating friends during the height of Covid? Awards shows do that for you: it's live, on TV, ready for your second-screen experience. That's been true for decades at this point, since well before Elon Musk bought Twitter. (If anything, the social media landscape seems more fragmented now than it did five or six years ago.) What's emerged from the great streaming shift is that awards shows function as particularly organic second-screen entertainment, something streamers have quietly and insidiously backwards-engineered with some of their shows and movies. Scripted (shudder) 'content,' material that's clearly designed to be passively consumed while fiddling with your phone or folding laundry, tends toward clunky exposition, repeated plot points, and an overall glossy indifference to tight, engaging narrative. Viewers may not immediately clock the difference, especially if they're performing the designated distractions while watching, but the empty-calorie nature of so many streaming movies and shows may eventually (fail to) add up, especially when compared with so much great work of the past. But awards shows are already like that by design! Hosts, presenters, announcers and on-screen graphics all tell you what's happening, repeatedly. Clips, speeches and live performances even offer catch-up context for whatever plays, songs or movies you aren't personally caught up with. Rare moments of chaos or genuine spontaneity get the instant-replay treatment on social media – as do micro-expressions from just about anyone caught on camera, subject to ridiculous levels of analysis exploiting the fact that sometimes people, even famous ones, affect neutral expressions in public. Network TV has approximated a particularly celeb-saturated Instagram feed without even trying. There's probably a grim irony in the fact that many millions of people would prefer to second-screen the experience of Anora winning a bunch of Oscars than to actually sit down and pay attention to Anora – just one of many movies that is, in terms of merging art and entertainment, a lot more potent and intellectually rewarding than a veg-out in front of the Oscars, even if someone as funny as Conan O'Brien is hosting. It's possible that our modern pop-cultural feeds have been awards-ified without even realizing it, turning too many other experiences into a kind of destructively participatory sporting event. Then again, it's hard to hold that against the Tonys, which offers an annual big-budget sampler of Broadway material to a lot of viewers who don't have regular access to the highest-profile stages in the country. (Hell, some of us media types who live in New York City still had no idea what Floyd Collins was before the ceremony.) If it takes an old-fashioned self-congratulatory awards show to cheerfully force-feed us some genuine culture in the virtual company of others, hey, it sure beats scrolling alone.
Scottish Sun
2 hours ago
- Scottish Sun
Ananda Lewis dead aged 52: Talk show & 90s MTV host dies after breast cancer battle
Click to share on X/Twitter (Opens in new window) Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window) ANANDA Lewis, the Talk show and 90s MTV host, has died after a long battle with breast cancer. Her sister Lakshmi announced the news of the 52-year-old's death in a Facebook post shared earlier today. 4 Ananda Lewis has died aged 52 Credit: Getty 4 The TV personality was a hit with celebs Credit: Getty 4 She died following a lengthy battle with cancer Credit: Getty She said: "She's free and in his heavenly arms. Lord, rest her soul." In 2020, Ananda revealed she had been diagnosed with stage three cancer. She said she had not been getting regular mammograms due to a fear of radiation. In 2024, the late TV host revealed her cancer had reached stage four after she went against medical advice and refused a double mastectomy. At the time she said her plan was to remove "excessive toxins" out of her body but later admitted she had made a mistake. She told CNN: "My plan at first was to get out excessive toxins in my body. "I felt like my body is intelligent, I know that to be true. Our bodies are brilliantly made. "I decided to keep my tumor and try to work it out of my body a different way. . . . I wish I could go back. It's important for me to admit where I went wrong with this.' Ananda rose to fame in the late 90s when she landed a role as one of MTV's VJ's where she hosted the likes of Total Request Live and Hot Zone. In 1999, The New York Times described her as 'the hip-hop generation's reigning It Girl.' Hit MTV reality show lands tenth series She left MTV in 2001 to host her own talk show, The Ananda Lewis Show. The TV star was born in Los Angeles in 1973. Her parents divorced when she was just two, an experience she said affected her relationship with her mum as an adult. Following the divorce, she and her sister moved in with their grandparents where Ananda went on to attend an arts high school. After graduating Howard University in 1995 she landed her first job as the host of BET's Teen Summit during which time she interviewed then First Lady Hillary Clinton. Ananda grew to be one of MTV's most popular hosts - interviewing some of Hollywood's biggest stars. Bob Kusbit, then MTV's senior vice president for production told The New York Times: ''In the past, our talent was sometimes just pretty people who could read cue cards,'' ''But when we brought Ananda to MTV, we decided we were going to do a lot more live television, and I was first and foremost interested in her ability to do live TV.''
The Guardian
6 hours ago
- The Guardian
Sydney Theatre Company books $10m revenue boost after Dorian Gray production becomes global hit
Sydney Theatre Company has recorded a $10m boost to revenue after its Dorian Gray production became a West End hit, and is poised to reap millions more when it receives a cut from this year's even more lucrative Broadway run. The company's chief executive, Anne Dunn, cited commercial in confidence when asked whether that additional $10m was attributable to the heavy lifting done by Kip Williams' phenomenally successful production, which is now grossing more than $1.6m a week on Broadway and earlier this week earned Snook her first Tony. More than 77,000 people paid to see Australia's stage adaptation of Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray in London's West End last year. Sign up for Guardian Australia's breaking news email But the Sydney Theatre Company is remaining tight-lipped about the part the internationally lauded production, which collected Laurence Olivier awards for best costume design and best actress for Snook, played on the company's bottom line in its 2024 annual report, released on Thursday. That report showed the company was still not out of the red but its total deficit shrunk from $1.8m in 2023 to $566,000. Gross revenue from continuing operations, which includes local box office takings and income from touring, licensing and royalty payments, came to $37.7m in 2024, $10m more than the company earned the previous year. After multiple sold-out Australian seasons, heavyweight theatrical production house Michael Cassel Group licensed the rights to the production to transfer Dorian Gray to London and New York. The nature of the deal with STC remains confidential, with Dunn saying only that STC has received royalties and has retained a 'small investment stake' in the production's ongoing life. That investment stake – just under $500,000 paid in 2023 – was secured through the generosity of STC donors, Dunn said. There is no evidence in the 2024 report that the company has stumped up another $500,000 to retain its stake in the Broadway production but Dunn said a further agreement with Cassel was signed early this year. While the generosity of the company's benefactors in 2023 made the global success of Dorian Gray possible, the largesse of supporters in 2024 was comparatively lean, with its fundraising arm earning just $4.86m compared with the previous year's $5.9m. 'It was a challenging start to the year on a number of issues and I think it's a very competitive environment for philanthropic support,' Dunn said. In November 2023, the company saw the departure of two of its board members and threats of cancelled subscriptions after three actors used a curtain call to signal their support for Palestinians in Gaza during a season of Chekhov's The Seagull. The company issued three apologies over the incident and cancelled one performance. While the protest took place in late 2023, its financial impact would not have been felt until the following year. 'It's an impossible question to answer specifically,' Dunn said. 'You're asking me, how much did we not receive? And that's something just we don't know. Philanthropy is something that people gift to the company each year, and some people may have chosen not to. We can't know exactly what they may have given if they had made a different decision.' Contrary to unconfirmed reports that the STC had lost some loyal followers due to The Seagull protest, subscriptions and casual ticket sales were up by more than 10,000 – from 228,847 in 2023 to 239,951 in 2024. Dunn described Suzie Miller's Ruth Bader Ginsberg play, RBG, One of Many, Joanna Murray-Smith's Julia Gillard work, Julia, and the adaptation of Pip Williams' The Dictionary of Lost Words as standout successes. The resonance the STC-commissioned RBG would have with US audiences is obvious but Dunn said there were as yet no formal discussions with the Michael Cassel Group on a follow-up to Dorian Gray's success on Broadway with RBG. 'But we can certainly see there would be some market appeal,' she said. The Michael Cassel Group did not respond to the Guardian's request for comment. Reflecting on Dorian Gray's overseas triumph, Dunn insisted STC had no regrets about partnering with commercial producers instead of going it alone and reaping the lion's share of the handsome profits. As a government-funded arts organisation, it was not the company's role to embark on risky overseas commercial ventures, she said. 'And taking a show to Broadway and the West End is a very risky proposition. As a not-for-profit theatre company in Australia, what we specialise in is generating new shows … It's about doing the work on creative development and giving space [for] these incredible shows' In 2024 STC received $2.58m from the federal government through Creative Australia and a further $574,000 from Create NSW, which contributed just 6.7% of the company's annual revenue. 'That makes us the most highly leveraged of the not-for-profit arts companies in the country,' she said. The Sydney Theatre Company will announce its 2026 season on 15 September.
