During his peak years of popularity and success, when Woody Allen stepped in front of the camera to whine, complain, or lament, he most often did so in the company of Tony Roberts. The veteran character actor died on Feb. 7 at age 85.
Although Allen is best known for promulgating a certain set of character types in his classic films, his own bookish worrywart or Diane Keaton’s moodily anxious beauty, he also must be credited for seeing the comic possibilities of the altogether less agitated and more grounded Roberts. In six feature films written or directed by Allen, from 1972’s Play It Again, Sam to 1987’s Radio Days, Roberts functioned as the straight man in Allen’s cinematic universe: He was the solid, good-natured presence off of whom Allen bounced assorted jokes, rants, and melancholic meanderings.
While Allen would warily hold forth, Roberts — tall, baritone-voiced, sometimes bearded — would listen with patient forbearance. Only an actor with great reserves of restraint could listen as placidly as Roberts does in Play It Again, Sam, when Allen’s character, a pathetically unattached film critic named Allan, confidently announces that his date finds him fetching. “She digs me — she’s playing it very cool,” Allan says, while Roberts looks on without seeming to agree or disagree. Roberts’s studied nonresponse is one of the highlights of the picture.
Born in New York City in 1939, Roberts was the son of radio and soap opera announcer Ken Roberts and his wife, Norma. With his commanding presence and ease with high comedy, Roberts was a natural on the boards: He logged appearances in the Broadway productions of Barefoot in the Park, How Now, Dow Jones, and, most consequentially, in the original 1966 production of Don’t Drink the Water, the first full-length play penned by Allen, then a stand-up comic who had not yet graduated to making his own films. Then came Play It Again, Sam, which originated as a play that opened on Broadway in 1969 and featured the same principal cast later used in the subsequent film adaptation: Allen, Keaton, and, of course, Roberts. By then, Roberts was becoming part of the writer-actor’s inner circle. “Tony Roberts … has always been a friend,” Allen told interviewer Stig Bjorkman in the book Woody Allen on Woody Allen. “I like to work with friends and with people I like, because one spends close time with them.”
Not that Allen wasn’t above poking fun at a friend: In many of their films together, Allen presented Roberts as so cool-headed as to verge on the comically supercilious. In Allen’s 1977 masterpiece Annie Hall, Roberts was cast as Rob, the alleged best friend of protagonist Alvy Singer (Allen) — “alleged” because Rob, traitorously from Alvy’s perspective, pulls up stakes from New York to California, where he finds work in sitcoms. In one memorable scene, Rob is seen orchestrating the laugh track: “Now give me a medium-size chuckle here.” Later, Rob saunters to his convertible in something like a white sweatshirt that, to our surprise, comes outfitted with a visor. “Are we driving through plutonium?” Alvy asks, and with Roberts’s inimitable straight face, Rob replies that the protective gear keeps out the “alpha rays” and prevents aging. Roberts delivers such lines with maximum slickness.
Perhaps because Roberts had a serious bearing even when being made the butt of a joke, several of his best non-Allen roles were in dramas: He was never less than memorable in Sidney Lumet’s Serpico (1973), Joseph Sargent’s The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974), and on the NBC movie, The Lindbergh Kidnapping Case (1976). He would have been familiar to viewers of network television thanks to his guest appearances on everything from The Love Boat to Trapper John, M.D. Law & Order became a frequent destination in his later years. He even lent credibility to 1983’s horror franchise entrant Amityville 3-D, in which he invested his character, a writer for a magazine devoted to the debunking of the paranormal, with gravity and authenticity.
Even so, it was Allen who utilized Roberts to his fullest advantage. Allen again cast Roberts in Stardust Memories (1980) and gave him essentially the co-leading role in A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy (1982). The writer-director turned to him again for glorified cameos in Hannah and Her Sisters (1986) and Radio Days. Allen, whose casting choices increasingly veered toward up-and-coming talent, eventually stopped using Roberts, but his films were the worse for it. Then, in 2001, Roberts turned up one last time in an Allen film, albeit a short one: Along with many of Allen’s actor pals, Roberts appeared in Sounds from a Town I Love, an Allen-directed short film made to support the post-9/11 benefit, “The Concert for New York City.” Roberts proved he could rattle off Allen’s dialogue as effortlessly as ever.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
In the mid-1990s, Roberts mounted something of a Broadway comeback in the stage version of Blake Edwards’s Victor/Victoria. He wrote an engaging memoir in 2015, Do You Know Me?, and continued to turn up on stage and small screen.
Roberts was the Fred MacMurray of modern character actors: likable, earnest, and forever funny.
Peter Tonguette is a contributing writer to the Washington Examiner magazine.