Tony Roberts obit

 

Tony Roberts, Woody Allen Sidekick and Broadway Stalwart, Dies at 85

The son of a famous radio announcer, the 'Annie Hall' and 'Play It Again, Sam' actor stepped in for Robert Redford in 'Barefoot in the Park.'

He was not on the list.

Tony Roberts, the urbane supporting actor known for his collaborations with Woody Allen in six films — including the Oscar best picture winner Annie Hall — and two Broadway plays, died Friday. He was 85.

Roberts died of complications from lung cancer at his home in Manhattan, his daughter, Nicole Burley, told The New York Times.

From Take Her, She’s Mine in 1961 to The Royal Family in 2009, Roberts appeared on Broadway 23 times. In between, he stepped in for Robert Redford in the original production of Neil Simon‘s Barefoot in the Park, directed by Mike Nichols.

In the long-running 1969-70 Broadway hit Play It Again, Sam, written by and starring Allen, Roberts portrayed Dick Christie, whose wife has an affair with his best friend, the magazine writer Allan Felix (Allen).

After Roberts received a best actor Tony nom for his performance, he and Allen reprised their roles for the 1972 movie version at Paramount that was directed by Herbert Ross.

The broad-shouldered, curly haired Roberts often played self-assured characters opposite the scrawny, neurotic Allen — as in Annie Hall (1977), in which he was a successful screenwriter-producer who goes Hollywood and becomes exasperated with Allen’s high-brow disdain of TV and California.

The filmmaker also cast Roberts in Stardust Memories (1980), A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy (1982), Hannah and Her Sisters (1986) and Radio Days (1987).

The two first met in 1966 when Roberts auditioned for Allen’s play Don’t Drink the Water. In fact, he auditioned four times.

“Producer David Merrick wanted me to be the third lead, but Woody wanted somebody else,” he recalled in a 2014 interview. “So I kept going back. Finally, Merrick told Woody to come see me in Barefoot in the Park … in the role of Paul. I was in it for 18 months.

“After the show one night, Woody walks in to my dressing room with his then-wife, Louise Lasser, and says, ‘You were great. How come you’re such a lousy auditioner?’ I still don’t have a good answer for that. But I got the part in Don’t Drink the Water.”

Roberts said that he “couldn’t have exchanged more than two sentences” with Allen on Don’t Drink the Water, which ran for 19 months and nearly 600 performances. They got closer in Play It Again, Sam.

In The New York Times, novelist Christopher Isherwood once wrote that Allen created Roberts’ characters to “epitomize suave charm in contrast to his own hapless shrubbery.”

David Anthony Roberts was born in New York on Oct. 22, 1939, and raised on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.

His father, Ken Roberts, was a radio announcer on daytime soap operas, quiz shows and The Shadow, which starred Orson Welles; his mother, Norma, worked as a “Girl Friday” for Betty Boop and Popeye cartoonist Ken Fleischer. Milton Berle dated his mom when they were high school classmates.

Roberts knew early on he wanted to be an actor. “My father would take me with him when I was seven, eight, 10 to the recording studio, where we would sit in a room and I would watch grown-ups in suits and ties pretend to be cops, robbers, astronauts, politicians,” he told Bill Boggs in 2016.

“They would act in front of a little piece of metal on a stand, but their bodies and their expressions were so invested in what their story was. It was like watching grown-ups behave like children. That is what did it for me.”

Roberts’ father, though, did not want him to pursue the profession. Also trying to dissuade him: his cousin, Everett Sloane, and his dad’s best friend, Paul Stewart, two Citizen Kane actors from Welles’ Mercury Players company.

Roberts was determined, however, and he attended The High School of Music & Art in Manhattan and then Northwestern, where he majored in speech and theater.

Roberts and Penny Fuller, his girlfriend from college, came to New York after school, and in 1962 he landed a part as a replacement in the Broadway comedy Take Her, She’s Mine, produced by Harold Prince, directed by George Abbott and starring Art Carney.

Fuller got the role of Elizabeth Ashley’s replacement in Barefoot in the Park, and when Redford was about to take a couple of weeks off, she got Roberts an audition to serve as a backup to Redford’s understudy.

Roberts was hired, then was unexpectedly pressed into service when the understudy broke his ankle playing softball. “His break was my big break,” Roberts often said. (Later, Robert Reed was hired as Redford’s full-time replacement, but he left the gig after about three months and Roberts took over for good.)

Merrick was a big fan of Roberts, also casting him (in addition to Don’t Drink the Water and Play It Again, Sam) on Broadway in the musical How Now, Dow Jones?, for which he received his first Tony nom; as Jerry Orbach’s replacement in Simon’s Promises, Promises; and in Sugar, the musical version of Some Like It Hot, which required him to wear women’s clothing and lipstick.

Roberts’ work on the Great White Way also included The Last Analysis; They’re Playing Our Song (as Robert Klein’s sub); Absurd Person Singular; Victor/Victoria, opposite Julie Andrews; The Tale of the Allergist’s Wife; The Sisters Rosensweig; Arsenic and Old Lace; and Cabaret.

Roberts also had supporting roles in two great ’70s New York City-set films, playing a cop in Serpico (1973) and a mayoral adviser in The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974).

While making Annie Hall, Roberts returned to his dressing-room trailer on Columbus Avenue to learn he’d been robbed, he recalled in a 2016 interview.

“When Woody found out about it, he said, ‘Did they get the script?’ I said, ‘Who cares, you have a million [scripts] lying around,’ ” Roberts said. “About a week later, they found it in a garbage pail a mile away. It was my pleasure to make him aware that [the thieves] thought the script was garbage.”

His movie résumé also included The Million Dollar Duck (1971), Le Sauvage (1975), Just Tell Me What You Want (1980), Key Exchange (1985), Blake Edwards‘ Switch (1991) and My Best Friend’s Wife (2001).

Roberts starred in three TV series: as a lawyer on NBC’s Rosetti and Ryan, as the boss of a radio psychologist (Lucie Arnaz) on CBS’ The Lucie Arnaz Show and as one of the husbands in a CBS adaptation of The Four Seasons. All were short-lived. Much earlier in his career, he appeared with Larry Hagman on the CBS soap opera The Edge of Night.

For more than two decades, he starred as Det. Stone Barrington in a series of audio books by Stuart Woods.

His memoir, Do You Know Me?, was released in 2015. Roberts said he published it independently after several book editors told him they would only handle it if he included details about Allen’s personal life.

Asked in the 2014 interview if his frequent work with the filmmaker was “a case of opposites attracting or do you think, on some level, Allen really wishes he were you?” Roberts responded with a laugh.

“There have been times when I wished I was him,” he said. “I would like to have his gift and his genius and his brain, which is something to revel at. He’s about as knowledgeable on most subjects as anyone I know — whether you’re talking music or painting or history or politics. He is up to the minute with a lot of intellectual input. That’s a pleasure to be around. I wouldn’t want his deeper neuroses, but I don’t think he’d want mine. I mean that.”

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