Tony Roberts was born in New York in 1939. After attending Northwestern University be made his Broadway debut in 1962 in “Something About A Soldier”. He is best known or his work in the films of Woody Allen including “Play It Again Sam”, “Annie Hall” and “Hannah and her Sisters”.
TCM Overview:
This tall, curly-haired son of longtime CBS radio announcer Ken Roberts debuted on Broadway in “Something About a Soldier” (1962). Twice-nominated for Tony Awards, Tony Roberts has had notable collaborations with Neil Simon (appearing in three Broadway productions, a film and a national tour) and Woody Allen (two plays and six films). Although Roberts’ stage credits have outnumbered his film appearances, he is perhaps best recalled for his work with Allen. He reprised his stage success as the businessman and best friend whose wife (Diane Keaton) Allen covets in “Play It Again, Sam” (1972). Roberts’ command of upwardly mobile mannerisms and affectations made him the perfect WASP foil to Allen’s nebbish persona as evidenced by the best-friend roles he played in such films as “Annie Hall” (1977), “A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy” (1982) and “Hannah and Her Sisters” (1986).
Roberts has acted in other films, including Sidney Lumet’s “Serpico” (1973, again as an intimate of the title character), “The Taking of Pelham One, Two, Three” (1974, as a mayoral aide) and Lumet’s “Just Tell Me What You Want” (1980, as a gay film executive). As the star of “Amityville 3-D” (1983), Roberts turned in a solid performance that complemented the competence at all levels that kept that sequel from being trashy. He took a few days’ leave from the hit musical “Jerome Robbins’ Broadway” (1990) to rush to L.A. to film his role as a nasty advertising executive in Blake Edwards’ “Switch” (1991).
Despite his frequent Broadway appearances, Roberts has rarely been the first choice, originating few musical roles like his Tony-nominated turn in the unsuccessful “How Now, Dow Jones” (1967). While he was the first to play the parts on stage, he inherited two well-known roles, both involving drag: Joe/Josephine, the role originated by Tony Curtis in Billy Wilder’s 1959 classic “Some Like It Hot”, in “Sugar” (1972), and Toddy, the gay mentor of a down and out singer, in Blake Edwards’ 1996 stage version of “Victor, Victoria”. Roberts has also appeared in non-musical roles, most notably in “Absurd Person Singular” (1974) and in the revival of “Arsenic and Old Lace” (1986). He also tried his hand at directing with the 1992 Off-Broadway staging of Charles Grodin’s comedy “One of the All-Time Greats”.
But whatever qualities that made him Woody Allen’s favorite WASP for a while never translated to the small screen. His featured work as Lee Pollack on “The Edge of Night” (1963-67) and his starring turns on the short-lived series “Rosetti and Son” (NBC, 1977), “The Four Seasons” (CBS, 1984), “The Lucie Arnaz Show” (CBS, 1985) and “The Thorns” (ABC, 1988) all failed to captivate the public. The nondescript actor persevered all the same, carving out his niche as a working actor. In the 90s, he teamed with his future “Victor, Victoria” co-star Julie Andrews in her TV-movie debut “Our Sons” (ABC, 1991) and also acted in the ABC movie “Not in My Family” (1993), “Arthur Miller’s American Clock” (TNT, 1993) and NBC’s “Perry Mason Mystery: The Case of the Jealous Jokester” (1995). He also provided voices for PBS documentaries “Buckminster Fuller: Thinking Out Loud” (1996) and “The Trial of Adolph Eichmann
The above TCM overview can also be accessed online here.
The Times obituary in 2025
Ruggedly handsome, broad-shouldered and suavely self-assured, Tony Roberts was perhaps everything Woody Allen would have liked to be.
Allen cast Roberts as his tall, confident wingman in no fewer than six of his films, including Annie Hall (1977) in which he portrayed Rob, a Hollywood actor and best friend and tennis partner of Allen’s Alvy Singer. In one memorable scene Allen’s character ranted about finding antisemites everywhere. “You know, I was having lunch with some guys from NBC and I said, ‘Did you eat yet?’ and [they] said, ‘No, Jew?’ Not, ‘Did you?,’ but ‘Jew eat? Jew?’ Not ‘Did you?,’ but ‘Jew eat?’ ”. To which Roberts’s character laconically replied, “You see conspiracies in everything.” The exchange seemed to sum up their relationship — the nervous, insecure Allen and his good-looking, urbane, nonchalant companion trying to keep his tortured friend’s neuroses in check
Best friends off-screen as well as on it, Roberts played similar types in other Allen films. In Stardust Memories (1980), he was a brash, street-smart actor who brought a Playboy model to a film festival while Allen played an angst-ridden move director. In A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy (1982), he was a jovial womanising bachelor who declares that “Marriage, for me, is the death of hope” and in Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), he was the effortlessly cool sperm donor who gives Mia Farrow and her infertile husband twin boys. It was not lost on critics that Farrow and Allen, her partner at the time, had attempted to conceive a child together before adopting.
Christopher Isherwood noted that Allen created Roberts’s characters as a foil to “epitomise suave charm in contrast to his own hapless shrubbery”. Roberts himself was less certain about why they worked so well together. “I don’t know what chemistry we lucked upon,” he said. “Woody said people like our schmoozing.. If it was a case of opposites attract and Roberts fulfilled the role of a fantasy alter ego for Allen, then Roberts admitted that in turn there were times when he wished he were Allen.“I would like to have his gift and his genius and his brain. He’s as knowledgeable on most subjects as anyone I know whether you’re talking music or painting or history or politics. That’s a pleasure to be around. But I wouldn’t want his deeper neuroses,” he said of the friend he called “Max” after Allen had asked him not to use his real name in public.
His loyalty to Allen was evident in 2015 when he wrote Do You Know Me?, his autobiography. Several publishers told him they would publish the memoir if it included details about Allen’s personal life. Roberts refused and had the book published independently, forgoing the usual publisher’s advance.
At times when he was not working, he feared that his serial collaborations with Allen might have typecast him. “I was always so vividly the guy Woody wrote that everybody in the business would think of me that way,” he said in 1997. “The persona I was for Woody is a hard thing to break out of.”
The comment suggested a touch of his friend’s insecurity had rubbed off, for in reality, away from the films he made with Allen, he was a prolific actor on stage and screen. Asked if he ever took a vacation, he replied, “No, I crack under leisure.”
His memoir began with a stranger interrupting him one afternoon when he was sitting on a bench in Central Park before saying, “I’ve seen you in something, but I can’t place it. What have I seen you in?” If it was not one of the six films he made with Allen, it might have been in a range of other hit movies from Sidney Lumet’s Serpico (1973), in which he played alongside Al Pacino, to his lead role in Amityville 3-D as the tabloid journalist who buys the infamous haunted house — or in one of the two dozen plays in which he starred on Broadway.
Indeed, it was on the New York stage that Roberts first encountered Allen in 1966 when he auditioned for his play Don’t Drink the Water. It ran for nearly 600 performances over a year and a half, although Roberts claimed that in all that time they hardly exchanged “more than two sentences”.
They grew closer when Roberts appeared on Broadway again in Play It Again, Sam, written by and starring Allen. Roberts received a best actor Tony nomination for his performance and he and Allen reprised their roles in the 1972 movie version directed by Herbert Ross.
David Anthony Roberts was born in Manhattan in 1939, the son of Norma (née Finkelstein), an animator, and Ken Roberts, a radio announcer. His father claimed he knew his son was destined to be an actor when at the age of four he was transfixed by hearing Laurence Olivier in Shakespeare’s Henry V on the radio.
To show his son how a radio station operated, he started taking him to work with him. “We would sit in a room and I would watch grown-ups in suits and ties pretend to be cops, robbers, astronauts, politicians,” recalled Roberts. “They would act in front of a little piece of metal on a stand, but their bodies and their expressions were so invested in their story. It was like watching grown-ups behave like children. That is what did it for me.”
He went on to major in speech and theatre at Manhattan’s High School of Music & Art and at Northwestern University. He later married Jennifer Lyons, a former dancer, but the marriage ended in 1975; he is survived by their daughter, Nicole Burley.. After graduating he returned to New York and his breakthrough came fortuitously in the first Broadway run of Neil Simon’s Barefoot in the Park as the back-up to the understudy to Robert Redford.
When Redford took a two-week vacation, the understudy promptly broke his ankle playing softball. “His break was my big break,” Roberts said. It was while filling in for Redford that Allen saw him and recruited him to appear in Don’t Drink the Water.
“We were friends and had identifiable repartee,” he said of their long collaboration. “The intimacy you saw was real.” There was also some gentle teasing. While making Annie Hall, Roberts returned to his dressing-room trailer to find he had been robbed. The first thing Allen wanted to know was had Roberts’s copy of the script been stolen..
About a week later, they found it in a garbage pail a mile away,” he recalled. “It was my pleasure to make him aware that the thieves thought the script was garbage.”
Tony Roberts, actor, was born on October 22, 1939. He died of lung cancer on February 7, 2025, aged 85